Re: Idea for improving speed of pg_restore

We already have on TODO:

    * Turn off after-change writes if fsync is disabled (?)

I am wondering if we should remove the fsync option completely and just
have a "os_crash_unsafe" option that turns off fsync and WAL, or at
least all the WAL used for os crash recovery --- I think we still need
WAL to recover from dirty buffers that didn't get written to the OS
cache.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Tom Lane wrote:
> Christopher Browne <cbbrowne@acm.org> writes:
> > Restoring a database involves, for each table:
> >  1. Reading table data from the source file;
> >  2. Writing data to the database file for the table;
> >  3. After that, reading the database file data, and
> >  4. Writing the sorted bits to the index file.
> >  5. Along with all of this, HEFTY amounts of updates to WAL.
>
> An idea that Marc and Jan and I were kicking around last night was to
> offer a GUC option to disable writes to WAL.  During initial data load,
> you might as well go back to initdb if you have any failure, so why
> bother with full ACID compliance?  I'm not sure if the performance
> benefit would be great enough to make it worth equipping the system
> with such a large-caliber foot-gun, but it's something to think about.
>
> I tend to agree with your doubts about parallelizing index builds,
> but there may be scenarios where it's a win; it'd depend on your
> relative CPU and disk horsepower.  (Consider fast disk and multiple
> not-so-fast CPUs; serial index builds can only use one of the CPUs.)
> Question is, is it a big enough win for enough people to make it worth
> supporting?
>
>             regards, tom lane
>
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