Nice. So then what I said is true – it’s a point of failure for uptime (the node would crash and probably refuse to restart while there are I/O errors) but not durability.
Using a ramdisk for the databases is then actually quite feasible, at least for Linux systems that do not reboot frequently! I might investigate making this change on one of my smaller nodes and seeing if it has any impact on metrics.
I wonder if audits would be impacted by I/O errors on the database. If they do then a node could be suspended/disqualified needlessly. Audits IMO should not even touch the databases since audit traffic isn’t paid anyway. There’s no reason for audits to be waiting on databases or even attempting to read/write on the DB files, no?