Nikolay and Michael discuss synchronous_commit — what it means on single node setups, for synchronous replication setups, and the pros and cons of the different options for each.
Here are some links to things they mentioned:
- synchronous_commit https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/runtime-config-wal.html#GUC-SYNCHRONOUS-COMMIT
- synchronous_commit history on pgPedia https://pgpedia.info/s/synchronous_commit.html
- Patroni’s maximum_lag_on_failover setting https://patroni.readthedocs.io/en/master/replication_modes.html#asynchronous-mode-durability
- wal_writer_delay https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/runtime-config-wal.html#GUC-WAL-WRITER-DELAY
- Selective asynchronous commits in PostgreSQL - balancing durability and performance (blog post by Shayon Mukherjee) https://www.shayon.dev/post/2025/75/selective-asynchronous-commits-in-postgresql-balancing-durability-and-performance/
- Asynchronous Commit https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/wal-async-commit.html
- synchronous_standby_names https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/runtime-config-replication.html#GUC-SYNCHRONOUS-STANDBY-NAMES
- Jepson article about Amazon RDS multi-AZ clusters (by Kyle Kingsbury, aka "Aphyr”) https://jepsen.io/analyses/amazon-rds-for-postgresql-17.4
~~~
What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!
~~~
Postgres FM is produced by:
- Michael Christofides, founder of pgMustard
- Nikolay Samokhvalov, founder of Postgres.ai
With credit to:
- Jessie Draws for the elephant artwork