Hi Bill,

> Hey ... are we related?

I live in the UK....perhaps we are long lost cousins? :-)

> Sounds to me like you're trying to solve the problem incorrectly, however.
> I assume the concern is $$ saving by powering off the servers, and I'll
> tell you from 1st hand experience that it's probably not that much money.
> We're in the midst of management fighting us to save $$ whereever possible
> right now, and I just yesterday did a test that demonstrates that going to
> the trouble to turn off individual workstations saves us a mere $35 per
> year per workstation.  Of course, servers tend to be more power hungry,
> so you may need to double to quadruple that value, but (really) how much
> money is that?
>
> Perhaps considering some sort of server consolidation would be wiser, such
> as vitalization or simply putting multiple services on each server.

I guess that it's more a matter of politics or perception; I'd like to
be able to boast that our application is very robust, and can easily
handle server downtime (which has been our experience with Slony thus
far), or turning off servers when not needed. I can see how it would
be a bad idea to widely recommend this to slony users, because some
have massive databases where, if a slave is left to fall behind for
long enough it will literally never be able to catch up with the
master. I myself do not have such a large database, and hope that my
users can attain acceptable performance while doing this sort of
thing. Not that this will be a "salesman on the road" type scenario,
but it's a valuable thing to be able to do

Thanks,
John Moran