Increase PostgreSQL write speed at the cost of likely data loss?

Question

I love that PostgreSQL is crash resistant, as I don\'t want to spend time fixing a database. However, I\'m sure there must be some things I can disable/modify so that i

Answer 1

Well one thing you could do to speed things up is drop the index you are creating manually - the primary key constraint already auto-creates a unique index on that column as you can see below (I'm testing on 8.3):

postgres=> CREATE TABLE "user"
postgres-> (
postgres(>   id serial NOT NULL,
postgres(>   username character varying(40),
postgres(>   email character varying(70),
postgres(>   website character varying(100),
postgres(>   created integer,
postgres(>   CONSTRAINT user_pkey PRIMARY KEY (id)
postgres(> )
postgres-> WITH ( OIDS=FALSE );
NOTICE:  CREATE TABLE will create implicit sequence "user_id_seq" for serial column "user.id"
NOTICE:  CREATE TABLE / PRIMARY KEY will create implicit index "user_pkey" for table "user"
CREATE TABLE
postgres=> CREATE INDEX id ON "user" USING btree (id);
CREATE INDEX
postgres=> \d user
                                  Table "stack.user"
  Column  |          Type          |                     Modifiers
----------+------------------------+---------------------------------------------------
 id       | integer                | not null default nextval('user_id_seq'::regclass)
 username | character varying(40)  |
 email    | character varying(70)  |
 website  | character varying(100) |
 created  | integer                |
Indexes:
    "user_pkey" PRIMARY KEY, btree (id)
    "id" btree (id)

Also, consider changing wal_sync_method to an option that uses O_DIRECT - this is not the default on Linux