Buffered Writes to Disk

Maintaining High Availability and Consistency of Data

When we first started buffering writes to the database, we hit a snag where the system experienced significant periods of downtime due to blocking writes to disk. While the buffers were being flushed, we couldn't add anymore data to them (as they were full), and we couldn't trust the database because it hadn't reached full consistency with the application yet. The only way to circumvent the issues here would be to cache relevant data in-memory, either in our app or in a fast remote key-value store.