Re: Turning on archive_mode by default

Greetings,

* Peter Eisentraut (peter(dot)eisentraut(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com) wrote:
> On 2020-05-20 16:21, Devrim Gündüz wrote:
> >Does anyone know whether there is an overhead of turning on
> >archive_mode, and setting archive_command to /bin/true?
>
> The overhead is probably small, but what this would do is start the archiver
> and report to stats views etc. that archiving is running and progressing,
> even though it's doing nothing. That seems pretty bogus and confusing.

I tend to agree with it being confusing. Simpler might be to just
depend on pgbackrest and automatically set up archiving and backups.

> Most users[citation needed] don't even use archiving anymore, so this is the
> wrong end of history to be fiddling with this setting.

No. Lots of users use archiving and until we've got a real answer to
being able to perform bulk archiving at scale, that's not likely to
change. pg_receivewal is absolutely not reasonable as a solution to
WAL archiving and management.

We've considered adding WAL streaming support to pgbackrest but it's not
much of a priority because it's rather ugly and not particularly better
than archive_command for most use-cases. Of course, we'd certainly
encourage folks to work with us to develop it and send us patches for
it.

Thanks,

Stephen