Hi,
On 2021-10-31 10:59:19 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> The general policy at the moment is that a normally-functioning server
> should emit *no* log traffic by default (other than a few messages
> at startup and shutdown). log_checkpoints is a particularly poor
> candidate for an exception to that policy, because it would produce so
> much traffic.
It shouldn't cause that much traffic - if the database is idle /
read-only, we don't trigger checkpoints. And these days that appears to
be reliable.
> No DBA would be likely to consider it as anything but log spam.
I don't agree at all. No postgres instance should be run without
log_checkpoints enabled. Performance is poor if checkpoints are
triggered by anything but time, and that can only be diagnosed if
log_checkpoints is on.
> > It seems the checkpoint stats, that are emitted to server logs when
> > the GUC log_checkpoints is enabled, are so important that a postgres
> > database provider would ever want to disable the GUC.
>
> This statement seems ridiculous on its face.
It matches my experience. I think it's negligent to not turn it on on
anything but an absolutely toy database. And there it has practically no
cost.
The typical course is that suddenly the database has slowed down to a
crawl because checkpoints happen on an accelerated schedule due
max_wal_size. Without log_checkpoints one cannot diagnose this, and even
just turning on going forward isn't quite sufficient, because that
doesn't tell you whether checkpoints always were triggered by "xlog".
> If users need to wait with bated breath for a checkpoint report, we
> have something else we need to fix.
Well, we probably do. But it's not that easy to fundamentally improve
the situation.
Greetings,
Andres Freund
