Re: patch to allow disable of WAL recycling

Hi,

On 2018-07-15 20:55:38 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> That's not the way to think about it. On a COW file system, we don't
> want to "create 16MB files" at all --- we should just fill WAL files
> on-the-fly, because the pre-fill activity isn't actually serving the
> intended purpose of reserving disk space. It's just completely useless
> overhead :-(. So we can't really make a direct comparison between the
> two approaches; there's no good way to net out the cost of constructing
> the WAL data we need to write.

We probably should still allocate them in 16MB segments. We rely on the
size being fixed in a number of places. But it's probably worthwhile to
just do a posix_fadvise or such. Also, if we continually increase the
size with each write we end up doing a lot more metadata transactions,
which'll essentially serve to increase journalling overhead further.

Greetings,

Andres Freund