Alex Satrapa <alex@lintelsys.com.au> writes:
> 1) Under Linux, if you have the file system containing the WAL mounted
> with asynchronous writes, "all bets are off". The *BSD crowd (that I
> know of) take great pleasure in constantly reminding me that if the
> power fails, my file system will be in an indeterminate state - things
> could be half-written all over the file system.
This is pretty out of date. If you use a journaling filesystem
(there are four solid ones available and modern distros use them)
metadata is consistent and crash recovery is fast.
Even with ext2, WAL files are preallocated and PG calls fsync() after
writing, so in practice it's not likely to cause problems.
-Doug