Re: PostgreSQL's handling of fsync() errors is unsafe and risks data loss at least on XFS

> On Apr 8, 2018, at 16:16, Andres Freund  wrote:
> We don't panic that way when getting IO
> errors during reads either, and they're more likely to be persistent
> than errors during writes (because remapping on storage layer can fix
> issues, but not during reads).

There is a distinction to be drawn there, though, because we immediately pass an error back to the client on a read, but a write problem in this situation can be masked for an extended period of time.

That being said...

> There's a lot of not so great things here, but I don't think there's any
> need to panic.

No reason to panic, yes.  We can assume that if this was a very big persistent problem, it would be much more widely reported.  It would, however, be good to find a way to get the error surfaced back up to the client in a way that is not just monitoring the kernel logs.

--
-- Christophe Pettus
   xof@thebuild.com