PostgreSQL 10 High Performance - Third Edition

Disk layout guidelines

There are a few guidelines that can help you prune down the possible configurations:

• Avoid putting the WAL on the OS drive, because they have completely different access patterns and both will suffer when combined. Normally, this might work out fine initially, only to discover a major issue when the OS is doing things such as a system update or daily maintenance activity. Rebuilding the filesystem database used by the locate utility each night is one common source on Linux for heavy OS disk activity.
• If you have evidence you don't do any large sorting, the temporary files can be kept at their default location, as part of the database disk.
• On Linux systems running ext3, where fsync cache flushes require dumping the ...