Re: Page Checksums

On Sat, Jan 21, 2012 at 6:12 PM, Jim Nasby <jim(at)nasby(dot)net> wrote:
> On Jan 10, 2012, at 3:07 AM, Simon Riggs wrote:
>> I think we could add an option to check the checksum immediately after
>> we pin a block for the first time but it would be very expensive and
>> sounds like we're re-inventing hardware or OS features again. Work on
>> 50% performance drain, as an estimate.
>>
>> That is a level of protection no other DBMS offers, so that is either
>> an advantage or a warning. Jim, if you want this, please do the
>> research and work out what the probability of losing shared buffer
>> data in your ECC RAM really is so we are doing it for quantifiable
>> reasons (via old Google memory academic paper) and to verify that the
>> cost/benefit means you would actually use it if we built it. Research
>> into requirements is at least as important and time consuming as
>> research on possible designs.
>
> Maybe I'm just dense, but it wasn't clear to me how you could use the information in the google paper to extrapolate data corruption probability.
>
> I can say this: we have seen corruption from bad memory, and our Postgres buffer pool (8G) is FAR smaller than
> available memory on all of our servers (192G or 512G). So at least in our case, CRCs that protect the filesystem
> cache would protect the vast majority of our memory (96% or 98.5%).

Would it be unfair to assert that people who want checksums but aren't
willing to pay the cost of running a filesystem that provides
checksums aren't going to be willing to make the cost/benefit trade
off that will be asked for? Yes, it is unfair of course, but it's
interesting how small the camp of those using checksummed filesystems
is.

Robert Treat
conjecture: xzilla.net
consulting: omniti.com