No matter I turn on or turn off the "full_page_writes", I always observe 8192-byte writes of log data for simple write operations (write/update).
Not sure how you measured it, but ISTM that the correct GUC to play with is "fsync". If thats turned off, the WAL buffers won't be fsynced to the disk at every commit. But that would mean reduced reliability in case of database crash.
And I should have added that post 8.3, we also have a user-settable parameter called synchronous_commit. Normally, database must write WAL up to the commit record to the stable storage when a transaction commits to ensure that there is no data loss in case of database crash. But if synchronous_commit is turned off, the database might delay writing the WAL buffers to the disk, thus reducing write activity, but at a increased risk of data loss.
