Hi, On 2018-07-15 20:55:38 -0400, Tom Lane wrote: > That's not the way to think about it. On a COW file system, we don't > want to "create 16MB files" at all --- we should just fill WAL files > on-the-fly, because the pre-fill activity isn't actually serving the > intended purpose of reserving disk space. It's just completely useless > overhead :-(. So we can't really make a direct comparison between the > two approaches; there's no good way to net out the cost of constructing > the WAL data we need to write.
We probably should still allocate them in 16MB segments. We rely on the size being fixed in a number of places. But it's probably worthwhile to just do a posix_fadvise or such. Also, if we continually increase the size with each write we end up doing a lot more metadata transactions, which'll essentially serve to increase journalling overhead further. Greetings, Andres Freund
