Hi, On Fri, Jan 8, 2021, at 01:53, Laurenz Albe wrote: > On Thu, 2021-01-07 at 16:14 -0500, Stephen Frost wrote: > > I expected there'd be some disagreement on this, but I do continue to > > feel that it's sensible to enable checksums by default. > > +1
I don't disagree with this in principle, but if you want that you need to work on making checksum overhead far smaller. That's doable. Afterwards it makes sense to have this discussion. > I think the problem here (apart from the original line of argumentation) > is that there are two kinds of PostgreSQL installations: > > - installations done on dubious hardware with minimal tuning > (the "cheap crowd") > > - installations done on good hardware, where people make an effort to > properly configure the database (the "serious crowd") > > I am aware that this is an oversimplification for the sake of the argument. > > The voices against checksums on by default are probably thinking of > the serious crowd. > > If checksums were enabled by default, the cheap crowd would benefit > from the early warnings that something has gone wrong. > > The serious crowd are more likely to choose a non-default setting > to avoid paying the price for a feature that they don't need. I don't really buy this argument. That way we're going to have an ever growing set of things that need to be tuned to have a database that's usable in an even halfway busy setup. That's unavoidable in some cases, but it's a significant cost across use cases. Increasing the overhead in the default config from one version to the next isn't great - it makes people more hesitant to upgrade. It's also not a cost you're going to find all that quickly, and it's a really hard to pin down cost. Andres
