On 04/17/2015 08:36 PM, Simon Riggs wrote:
On 17 April 2015 at 18:12, Heikki Linnakangas <hlinn...@iki.fi> wrote:

On 04/17/2015 12:04 PM, Simon Riggs wrote:

On 17 April 2015 at 09:54, Andres Freund <and...@anarazel.de> wrote:

  Hrmpf. Says the person that used a lot of padding, without much
discussion, for the WAL level infrastructure making pg_rewind more
maintainable.

Sounds bad. What padding are we talking about?

In the new WAL format, the data chunks are stored unaligned, without
padding, to save space. The new format is quite different to the old one,
so it's not straightforward to compare how much that saved.

The key point here is the whole WAL format was changed to accommodate a
minor requirement for one utility. Please notice that nobody tried to stop
you doing that.

The changes Andres is requesting have a very significant effect on a major
new facility. Perhaps there is concern that it is an external utility?

If we can trust Heikki to include code into core that was written
externally then I think we can do the same for Andres.

I'm not concerned of the fact it is an external utility. Well, it concerns me a little bit, because that means that it'll get little testing with PostgreSQL. But that has nothing to do with the WAL size question.

I think its time to stop the padding discussion and commit something
useful. We need this.

To be honest, I'm not entirely sure what we're arguing over. I said that IMO the difference in WAL size is so small that we should just use 4-byte OIDs for the replication identifiers, instead of trying to make do with 2 bytes. Not because I find it too likely that you'll run out of IDs (although it could happen), but more to make replication IDs more like all other system objects we have. Andreas did some pgbench benchmarking to show that the difference in WAL size is about 10%. The WAL records generated by pgbench happen to have just the right sizes so that the 2-3 extra bytes bump them over to the next alignment boundary. That's why there is such a big difference - on average it'll be less. I think that's acceptable, Andreas seems to think otherwise. But if the WAL size really is so precious, we could remove the two padding bytes from XLogRecord, instead of dedicating them for the replication ids. That would be an even better use for them.

- Heikki



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