Tom,
> Maybe we need to actively discourage people from running Postgres
> against NFS-mounted data directories. Shane Kerr's paper cited above
> mentions some other rather scary properties, including O_EXCL file
> creation not really working properly.
Wouldn't you be describing a Linux-specific issue, though? And possibly
kernel-specific?
It's hard to reconcile this with the real-world performance of
PostgreSQL on NFS, which is happening all over the place. Most notably,
Joe Conway's 20,000 txn/sec.
I *do* think it's an accurate statement that if you're going to use
Postgres, or any other OLTP database, on NFS you'd better have access to
a NAS expert. But to say that it's a bad idea even if you have expert
help is probably going to far.
--Josh Berkus