Re: increasing the default WAL segment size

On Tue, Mar 21, 2017 at 6:02 PM, David Steele <david(at)pgmasters(dot)net> wrote:
> The biggest downside I can see is that this would change the naming scheme
> for the default of 16MB compared to previous versions of Postgres. However,
> for all other wal-seg-size values changes would need to be made anyway.

I think changing the naming convention for 16MB WAL segments, which is
still going to be what 99% of people use, is an awfully large
compatibility break for an awfully marginal benefit. We've already
created quite a few incompatibilities in this release, and I'm not
entirely eager to just keep cranking them out at top speed. Where
it's necessary to achieve forward progress in some area, sure, but
this feels gratuitous to me. I agree that we might have picked your
scheme if we were starting from scratch, but I have a hard time
believing it's a good idea to do it now just because of this patch.
Changing the WAL segment size has been supported for a long time, and
I don't see the fact that it will now potentially be
initdb-configurable rather than configure-configurable as a sufficient
justification for whacking around the naming scheme -- even though I
don't love the naming scheme we've got.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company