Re: Using of --data-checksums

On Tue, Apr 07, 2020 at 08:10:13AM -0700, BGoebel wrote:
> initdb --data-checksums "... help to detect corruption by the I/O system"
> There is an (negligible?) impact on performance, ok.
>
> Is there another reason NOT to use this feature ?
> Has anyone had good or bad experience with the use of  --data-checksums?

FWIW, I have a good experience with it.  Note that some performance
impact of up to ~1% may be noticeable if you have a large number of
buffer evictions from PostgreSQL shared buffer pool, but IMO the
insurance of knowing that Postgres is not the cause of an on-disk
corruption is largely worth it (in applications where I got that
enabled we did not notice any performance impact even in very heavy
production-like workloads, and this even if we had a rather low shared
buffer setting with a much larger set of hot pages, causing the OS
cache to be filled with most of the hot data).
--
Michael