Re: [HACKERS] fsync method checking

On 18 Mar, Tom Lane wrote:
> Josh Berkus <josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com> writes:
>> 1) This is an OSS project. Why not just recruit a bunch of people on
>> PERFORMANCE and GENERAL to test the 4 different synch methods using real
>> databases? No test like reality, I say ....
>
> I agree --- that is likely to yield *far* more useful results than
> any standalone test program, for the purpose of finding out what
> wal_sync_method to use in real databases. However, there's a second
> issue here: we would like to move sync/checkpoint responsibility into
> the bgwriter, and that requires knowing whether it's valid to let one
> process fsync on behalf of writes that were done by other processes.
> That's got nothing to do with WAL sync performance. I think that it
> would be sensible to make a test program that focuses on this one
> specific question. (There has been some handwaving to the effect that
> everybody knows this is safe on Unixen, but I question whether the
> handwavers have seen the internals of HPUX or AIX for instance; and
> besides we need to worry about Windows now.)

I could certainly do some testing if you want to see how DBT-2 does.
Just tell me what to do. ;)

Mark