On Mon, May 21, 2012 at 12:23 PM, Tom Lane <t...@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote: > If we were sure that the kernel error was permanent, then this argument > would be moot: the data is gone already. The scary thought here is that > it might be a transient error, such as a not-always-repeatable kernel > bug. In that case, zeroing the page would indeed lose data that had > been recoverable before.
Yeah, and in fact I think that's probably not a terribly remote scenario. Also, if you're running on dying hardware, you really do NOT want to force the kernel to write a whole bunch of pages back to the dying disk in the midst of trying to pg_dump it before it falls over. You just want to read what you can of what's there now. -- Robert Haas EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
