Re: Synchronization levels in SR

On Tue, Sep 7, 2010 at 11:06 AM, Simon Riggs  wrote:
> On Tue, 2010-09-07 at 16:31 +0200, Markus Wanner wrote:
>> On 09/07/2010 04:15 PM, Robert Haas wrote:
>> > In theory, that's true, but if we do that, then there's an even bigger
>> > problem: the slave might have replayed WAL ahead of the master
>> > location; therefore the slave is now corrupt and a new base backup
>> > must be taken.
>>
>> The slave isn't corrupt. It would suffice to "late abort" committed
>> transactions the master doesn't know about.
>
> The slave *might* be ahead of the master. And if it is, the case we're
> discussing is where the master just crashed and *might* not even be
> coming back at all, at least for a while. The standby does differ from
> master, but with the master down I don't regard that as a useful
> statement.
>
> If we wait for fsync on master and then transfer to standby the times
> are additive. If we do them concurrently the response times will be the
> maximum response time of fsync/transfer, as Markus observes.
>
> ISTM that most people would be more interested in reducing response
> times by ~50% rather than in being exactly correct in an edge case. So
> we should be planning that as a robustness option, not "it cannot be
> done", which seems to be echoing around to much for my liking.

People who are more concerned about performance than robustness aren't
going to use sync rep in the first place.  They're going to run it in
async, which will improve performance by FAR more than you'll ever be
able to manage by deciding that you don't care about handling some of
the failure cases correctly.

-- 
Robert Haas
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