Re: What happens when syslog gets blocked?

On Aug 6, 2009, at 2:00 PM, Bill Moran wrote:
> 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 ...


Bingo. I'm thinking we should make mention of this in the docs...
--
Decibel!, aka Jim C. Nasby, Database Architect  decibel@decibel.org
Give your computer some brain candy! www.distributed.net Team #1828