Andres Freund <and...@anarazel.de> writes: > On 2018-01-12 10:45:54 -0500, Tom Lane wrote: >> The xl_prev field is our only way of detecting that we're looking at >> old WAL data when we cross a sector boundary.
> Right. I wonder if it be reasonable to move that to a page's header > instead of individual records? To avoid torn page issues we'd have to > reduce the page size to a sector size, but I'm not sure that's that bad? Giving up a dozen or two bytes out of every 512 sounds like quite an overhead. Also, this'd mean that a much larger fraction of WAL records need to be split across page boundaries, which I'd expect to produce a performance hit in itself --- a page crossing has to complicate figuring out how much space we need for the record. regards, tom lane