Re: DRBD and Postgres: how to improve the perfomance?

On Sat, 8 Sep 2007, Joshua D. Drake wrote:

> You would have to have lightning handed by God to your server to have a
> total power failure without proper shutdown in the above scenario.

Do you live somewhere without thunderstorms? This is a regular event in
this part of the world during the summer. It happened to me once this
year and once last; lost count for previous ones. In both of the recent
cases it's believed the servers were burned from the Ethernet side because
somewhere in the network was a poor switch that wasn't isolated well
enough from the grid when the building was hit. Lightning is tricky that
way; cable TV and satellite wiring are also weak links that way.

I didn't feel too bad about last year's because the building next door
burned to the ground after being hit within a few seconds of mine, so the
fact that I had some server repair didn't seem like too much of a hardship
in comparison. The system was down until the fire department had put out
the blaze and I was allowed back into the building though. Good thing my
cell phone works in the server room; that phone call asking "are you aware
the building is being evacuated?" is always a fun one.

I'm not saying God hates you as much as me, because the fact that you've
made this statement says it's clearly not the case, just that a plan
presuming he's your buddy is a bad one. The way you're characterizing
this risk reminds me of when people quote the odds that they'll lose two
disks within seconds of one another in a disk array as if it's impossible,
something else which of course has also happened to me many times during
my career.

--
* Greg "Lucky" Smith gsmith(at)gregsmith(dot)com Baltimore, MD