On Wed, Jun 5, 2013 at 10:27 PM, Joshua D. Drake <j...@commandprompt.com> wrote: > > On 6/5/2013 10:07 PM, Daniel Farina wrote: >> >> >> If I told you there were some of us who would prefer to attenuate the >> rate that things get written rather than cancel or delay archiving for >> a long period of time, would that explain the framing of the problem? > > > I understand that based on what you said above. > > >> Or, is it that you understand that's what I want, but find the notion >> of such a operation hard to relate to? > > > I think this is where I am at. To me, you don't attenuate the rate that > things get written, you fix the problem in needing to do so. The problem is > one of provisioning. Please note that I am not suggesting there aren't > improvements to be made, there absolutely are. I just wonder if we are > looking in the right place (outside of some obvious badness like the PANIC > running out of disk space).
Okay, well, I don't see the fact that the block device is faster than the archive command as a "problem," it's just an artifact of the ratios of performance of stuff in the system. If one views archives as a must-have, there's not much other choice than to attenuate. An alternative is to buy a slower block device. That'd accomplish the same effect, but it's a pretty bizarre and heavyhanded way to go about it, and not easily adaptive to, say, if I made the archive command faster (in my case, I well could, with some work). So, I don't think it's all that unnatural to allow for the flexibility of a neat attenuation technique, and it's pretty important too. Methinks. Disagree? Final thought: I can't really tell users to knock off what they're doing on a large scale. It's better to not provide abrupt changes in service (like crashing or turning off everything for extended periods while the archive uploads). So, smoothness and predictability is desirable. -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
