Hacker News Reader

Comment by belter | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

"PostgreSQL used fsync incorrectly for 20 years"

https://archive.fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/postgresql_fs...

It did not prevent people from using it. You won't find a database that has the perfect durability, ease of use, performance ect.. It's all about tradeoffs.

Realistically speaking, postgresql wasn’t handling a failed call to fsync, which is wrong: but materially different from a bad design or errors in logic stemming from many areas.

Postgresql was able to fix their bug in 3 lines of code, how many for the parent system?

I understand your core thesis (sometimes durability guarantees aren’t as needed as we think) but in postgresql’s case, the edge was incredibly thin. It would have had to have been: a failed call to fsync and a system level failure of the host before another call to fsync (which are reasonably common).

It’s far too apples to oranges to be meaningful to bring up I am afraid.

NATS allows you to fsync every calls, it's not just the default value.

NATS was originally made for simple, fast, ephemeral messaging.

The persistence stuff is kinda new and it's not a surprise that there are limitations and bugs.

You should see this report as a good thing, as it will add pressure for improvements.

> The persistence stuff is kinda new and it's not a surprise that there are limitations and bugs.

It's not really that new. The precursor to JetStream was NATS Streaming Server [1], which was first tagged almost 10 years ago [2].

[1] https://github.com/nats-io/nats-streaming-server

[2] https://github.com/nats-io/nats-streaming-server/releases/ta...

do you have a better solution?

as they would say, NATS is a terrible message bus system, but all the others are worse

Pulsar can do most of what NATS can, but at a much higher cost in both compute and operations (though I haven’t seen a head-to-head of each with durability turned on), along with some simply different characteristics (like NATS being suitable for sidecar deployment). NATS is fantastic for ephemeral messaging, but some of this report is really concerning when JetStream has been shipping for years.

Are RabbitMQ's durable queues worse?

Interested to know if you found these issues yourself or from a source. Is Kafka any more robust?

Redpanda is https://jepsen.io/analyses/redpanda-21.10.1

This is just a tl;dr of the article with a mean-spirited barb added.

NATS is ephemeral. if you can accept that, then you'll be fine.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com