An important aspect of setting up a highly available database is starting with a stable configuration that will not require a lot of future modifications. Even settings that can be changed during database operation can drastically alter its performance profile and behavior. Other settings may require a full database restart, which can lead to a short outage, depending on how resilient the frontend application is.
We want to avoid introducing instability into our PostgreSQL database from the very beginning. To that end, we are going to explore common (and perhaps, uncommon) configuration options to use in a highly available installation.
The PostgreSQL documentation describes all of the settings we will be discussing. We recommend that you visit the PostgreSQL.org website and read the documentation regarding server configuration. There's probably too much to absorb before continuing with this section, but we recommend that you familiarize...