-<!-- $PostgreSQL: pgsql/doc/src/sgml/high-availability.sgml,v 1.8 2006/11/21 22:48:33 momjian Exp $ -->
+<!-- $PostgreSQL: pgsql/doc/src/sgml/high-availability.sgml,v 1.9 2006/11/22 03:44:52 momjian Exp $ -->
<chapter id="high-availability">
<title>High Availability and Load Balancing</title>
other server before each transaction commits. Heavy write
activity can cause excessive locking, leading to poor performance.
In fact, write performance is often worse than that of a single
- server. Read requests can be sent to any server. Clustering
- is best for mostly read workloads, though its big advantage
- is that any server can accept write requests — there is
- no need to partition workloads between master and slave servers,
- and because the data changes are sent from one server to another,
+ server. Read requests can be sent to any server. Some
+ implementations use cluster-wide shared memory or shared disk
+ to reduce the communication overhead. Clustering is best for
+ mostly read workloads, though its big advantage is that any
+ server can accept write requests — there is no need to
+ partition workloads between master and slave servers, and
+ because the data changes are sent from one server to another,
there is no problem with non-deterministic functions like
<function>random()</>.
</para>