I am running a postgresql server on Amazon EC2. My current plan is to mount an Amazon S3 bucket as a drive using PersistentFS which is a POSIX-compliant file system.
I will be using this for write-ahead-logging. The issue with S3 is that though the actual storage is cheap, they charge $1 per 100,000 put requests - so frequent fsyncs will
cost me a lot.
I've been talking to the makers of persistentFS, and one possible solution is for the file system to disobey fsyncs. I am trying to find out the implications of this method in
case of a crash. Will I only lose information since the last fsync? Or will the earlier data, in general, be corrupted due to some out-of-order writes (I remember seeing this somewhere)?
Thanks,
Ram
