Re: Hard limit on WAL space used (because PANIC sucks) - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

From Joshua D. Drake
Subject Re: Hard limit on WAL space used (because PANIC sucks)
Date
Msg-id 51B374CC.5080806@commandprompt.com
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: Hard limit on WAL space used (because PANIC sucks)  (Heikki Linnakangas <hlinnakangas@vmware.com>)
Responses Re: Hard limit on WAL space used (because PANIC sucks)
Re: Hard limit on WAL space used (because PANIC sucks)
List pgsql-hackers
On 06/06/2013 07:52 AM, Heikki Linnakangas wrote:
> I think it can be made fairly robust otherwise, and the performance
> impact should be pretty easy to measure with e.g pgbench.

Once upon a time in a land far, far away, we expected users to manage 
their own systems. We had things like soft and hard quotas on disks and 
last log to find out who was logging into the system. Alas, as far as I 
know soft and hard quotas are kind of a thing of the past but that 
doesn't mean that their usefulness has ended.

The idea that we PANIC is not just awful, it is stupid. I don't think 
anyone is going to disagree with that. However, there is a question of 
what to do instead. I think the idea of sprinkling checks into the 
higher level code before specific operations is not invalid but I also 
don't think it is necessary.

To me, a more pragmatic approach makes sense. Obviously having some kind 
of code that checks the space makes sense but I don't know that it needs 
to be around any operation other than we are creating a segment. What do 
we care why the segment is being created? If we don't have enough room 
to create the segment, the transaction rollsback with some OBVIOUS not 
OBTUSE error.

Obviously this could cause a ton of transactions to roll back but I 
think keeping the database consistent and rolling back a transaction in 
case of error is exactly what we are supposed to do.

Sincerely,

Joshua D. Drake



>
> - Heikki
>
>




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