On 7/1/07, Tom Lane <tgl@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
As long as shared_buffers is high enough, there doesn't seem to be much point in worrying about this; the incremental performance gain will be minimal since everything will be in RAM anyway.
Yes it will be but this does not mean there will be no disk i/o operations. Database contents still have to be backed up on disk (unless there is a mechanism of delayed wrtite to disk which I am not aware of). The memory engine as designed by MySQL (my interpretation) is to avoid the disk operations.
Or do you think losing the content of the database at server crash is a feature?
Yes it is. Anything designed to live in memory should be used to hold non vital information. The loosing/recreation of this information is implied by design of the application. One example is bittorent trackers which maintain data about the connected peers. Since connections are created/destroyed and there are more selects than insert/updates these applications use memory tables. Greetings, Alexander.
