Alvaro, Kevin,
Yeah, AFAICT the writes are handed off to the operating system (just
not synced), so if it flushes its caches sanely at all there
shouldn't be a problem.
I would certainly *hope* that's the case. We sometimes use fsync=off
for conversions, where we plan to just start over if the conversion
crashes, and set it to on when the conversion is done. It would be
disturbing to discover that fsync=off also means "don't bother to
write dirty buffers to the OS before shutdown."
It doesn't. But what I don't trust, and the *first* place I'd look for
problems, is whether the OS flushes *all* dirty buffers to disk in the
event the application gets killed.
That's why I want more information on Floris' case. Was 8.4 killed or
shut down with -m immediate? Or the os rebooted with 8.4 running?
--
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
www.pgexperts.com
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