Postgres FM

synchronous_commit

Postgres FM

Show Notes

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

More from Postgres FM

Oct 16, 2026

Nik and Michael are joined by Álvaro Hernández to discuss sharding Postgres with Citus and StackGres, especially the new query router support that has been added very recently.

Sep 25, 2026

Nik and Michael are joined by Salma El-Sayed and Kirk Wolak to discuss their in-progress and very ambitious Google Summer of Code project around adding Btree Merge support to Postgres.

Sep 18, 2026

Nik and Michael are joined by Sai Srirampur to discuss ClickHouse's new managed Postgres service.

Sep 11, 2026

Nik and Michael discuss hot_standby_feedback — what it controls, whether and when read replicas should be changed to on, and other settings you can change to help too.

Aug 21, 2026

Nik and Michael are joined by Shaun Thomas to discuss estimating work_mem, memory management in general, and writing an extension to help.

See all episodes →