Tunables to avoid

There are a few parameters in the postgesql.conf that have gathered up poor guidance in other guides you might come across, and they might already be set badly in a server whose configuration you're now responsible for. Others have names suggesting a use for the parameter that actually doesn't exist. This section warns you about the most common of those to avoid adjusting.

fsync

If you just want to ignore crash recovery altogether, you can do that by turning off the fsync parameter. This makes the value for wal_sync_method irrelevant, because the server won't be doing any WAL sync calls anymore.

It is important to recognize that if you have any sort of server crash when fsync is disabled, it is likely your database will be corrupted and no longer start afterwards. Despite this being a terrible situation to be running a database under, the performance speedup of turning crash recovery off is so large that you might come across suggestions you disable...