Book Image

PostgreSQL 9 High Availability Cookbook

By : Shaun Thomas
Book Image

PostgreSQL 9 High Availability Cookbook

By: Shaun Thomas

Overview of this book

A comprehensive series of dependable recipes to design, build, and implement a PostgreSQL server architecture free of common pitfalls that can operate for years to come. Each chapter is packed with instructions and examples to simplify even highly complex database operations. If you are a PostgreSQL DBA working on Linux systems who want a database that never gives up, this book is for you. If you've ever experienced a database outage, restored from a backup, spent hours trying to repair a malfunctioning cluster, or simply want to guarantee system stability, this book is definitely for you.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)
11
Index

Defusing cache poisoning


Not every DBA has experienced disk cache poisoning. Those who have recognize it as a bane to any critical OLTP system and a source of constant stress in a highly available environment.

When the operating system fetches disk blocks into memory, it also applies arbitrary aging, promotion, and purging heuristics. Several of these can invalidate cached data in the presence of an originating process change such as a database crash or restart. Any memory stored by PostgreSQL in shared memory is also purged upon database shutdown.

Perhaps the worst thing a DBA can do following a database crash or a restart is to immediately make the database available to applications and users. Unless storage is based on SSD or a very capable SAN, random read performance will drop by two or three orders of magnitude as data is being supplied by slow disks instead of by memory. As a result, all subsequent queries will greatly over-saturate the available disk bandwidth. This delays query results...