Re: What happens when syslog gets blocked?

In response to Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>:

> decibel <decibel@decibel.org> writes:
> > We recently had a problem with a database where the /var filesystem
> > got corrupted. This appears to have seriously impacted the ability of
> > STDERR from Postgres to get put out to disk, which ended up blocking
> > backends.
>
> > Because of this we want to switch from using STDERR to using syslog,
> > but I'm not sure if syslog() can end up blocking or not.
>
> syslog (at least in the implementations I'm familiar with) has the
> opposite problem: when the going gets tough, it starts losing messages.
> I do not think you'll really be making your life better by switching.

Well ... "life better" really depends on which failure scenario you're
more comfortable with ... personally, I'd rather lose log messages than
have the DB system go down.  Of course, if auditing is critical to your
scenario, then your priorities are different ...

--
Bill Moran
http://www.potentialtech.com
http://people.collaborativefusion.com/~wmoran/