maria-discuss team mailing list archive

[Gionatan Danti <g.danti@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Il 24-08-2018 17:25 Gionatan Danti ha scritto:
> So it really seems that a doublewrite-less MariaDB would be safe from
> corruption unless extraordinary bad luck (ie: mysqld crash at a
> *really small* wrong moment) hits.

Hi all,
I have a follow-up on my tests.

It seems that a write() up to 16 MB is unkillable/unstoppable when 
directly done on top of a ZFS filesystem. I *think* this is a deliberate 
result of how ARC accept write for buffering. It does not seems a 
coincidence that current max recordsize on a ZFS filesystem is 16 MB.

On the other side, layering a ext4 filesystem on top of a ZVOL does 
*not* avoid partial writes. Similarly, I *think* this is due the linux 
own pagecache accepting an interrupted write stream.

In short, it seems a performance vs correctness tradeoff: while 
pagecache is way faster (for reads/writes that hit), ARC seems to 
greatly favor correcteness by avoiding interrupted writes.

These are only *speculations* on my parts, but they are backed by my 
(empirical) test results. If they are correct, disabling doublewrite 
would be safe if mysqld runs directly on top of a ZFS filesystem, while 
it have a (small) probability of corruption itself when running inside a 
virtual machine and/or through another filesystem layer.

Regards.

--
Danti Gionatan
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