Internal timing of operations#

For a better understanding of how the different modes work, it’s helpful to know that legacy Physical Streaming Replication (PSR) and PGD apply transactions in different ways. These ordering differences have practical implications for performance, durability, and consistency. For a broader comparison of when to choose PGD over PSR, see Choosing between PSR and PGD .

With Legacy PSR, the order of operations is:

Origin flushes a commit record to WAL, making the transaction visible locally.
Peer node receives changes and issues a write.
Peer flushes the received changes to disk.
Peer applies changes, making the transaction visible on the peer.

Note that the change is written to the disk before applying the changes.

With PGD, by default and with Lag Control, the order of operations is different. In these cases, the change becomes visible on the peer before the transaction is flushed to the peer’s disk:

Origin flushes a commit record to WAL, making the transaction visible locally.
Peer node receives changes into its apply queue in memory.
Peer applies changes, making the transaction visible on the peer.
Peer persists the transaction by flushing to disk.

For PGD’s Quorum Commit, Group Commit, and CAMO, the origin node waits for a certain number of confirmations prior to making the transaction visible locally. The order of operations is:

Origin flushes a prepare or precommit record to WAL.
Peer node receives changes into its apply queue in memory.
Peer applies changes, making the transaction visible on the peer.
Peer persists the transaction by flushing to disk.
Origin commits and makes the transaction visible locally.

The following table summarizes the differences.

Variant	Order of apply vs persist	Replication before or after commit
PSR	persist first	after WAL flush of commit record
PGD Async	apply first	after WAL flush of commit record
PGD Lag Control	apply first	after WAL flush of commit record
PGD Quorum Commit	apply first	before COMMIT on origin
PGD Group Commit	apply first	before COMMIT on origin
PGD CAMO	apply first	before COMMIT on origin