Re: postmaster.pid

tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us (Tom Lane) wrote in message news:<29250.1043126140@sss.pgh.pa.us>...

> Yes, that was discussed.  I think the primary objection was that it's
> very non-robust if the $PGDATA directory is mounted via NFS.  (Quite
> a few of us think that if you run a database over NFS, you deserve to
> lose ;-( ... but there seem to be more than a few people out there doing
> it anyway.)

can anyone speak with _authority_ on this issue please.  i've been
researching it for a week and their seems to be much misunderstanding
surrounding the issue, even the developers of linux nfs seem to
disagree on the semantics of sync/lock issues on nfs!

my understanding is that, using a netapp with nvram and nfs3, if one

* exported the PGDATA filesystem as sync
* mounted the file system as sync

there should not be ANY issues using postgresql against an nfs
filesystem with the possible exception of rpc/lock issues (anyone?
anyone?).  furthermore, performance will most likely INCREASE over a
local disk since writes to nvram, even network attached nvram, can be
MUCH fast than writes to, for example, and IDE harddrive.

-a