Re: increasing the default WAL segment size

On 08/25/2016 01:12 PM, Robert Haas wrote:
>> I agree that #4 is best. I'm not sure it's worth the cost. I'm not worried
>> > at all about the risk of master/slave sync thing, per previous statement.
>> > But if it does have performance implications, per Andres suggestion, then
>> > making it configurable at initdb time probably comes with a cost that's not
>> > worth paying.
> At this point it's hard to judge, because we don't have any idea what
> the cost might be.  I guess if we want to pursue this approach,
> somebody will have to code it up and benchmark it.  But what I'm
> inclined to do for starters is put together a patch to go from 16MB ->
> 64MB.  Committing that early this cycle will give us time to
> reconsider if that turns out to be painful for reasons we haven't
> thought of yet.  And give tool authors time to make adjustments, if
> any are needed.

The one thing I'd be worried about with the increase in size is folks
using PostgreSQL for very small databases.  If your database is only
30MB or so in size, the increase in size of the WAL will be pretty
significant (+144MB for the base 3 WAL segments).  I'm not sure this is
a real problem which users will notice (in today's scales, 144MB ain't
much), but if it turns out to be, it would be nice to have a way to
switch it back *just for them* without recompiling.

-- 
--
Josh Berkus
Red Hat OSAS
(any opinions are my own)