Sure, but the default should be erring on the side of persistence and consistency. The throughput for a site like HN of actual writes is next to nil. It’s short

Sure, but the default should be erring on the side of persistence and consistency. The throughput for a site like HN of actual writes is next to nil. It’s short text only comments averaging a couple hundred bytes and you only have to pay for the fsync once anyway. If you have to turn off fsync to make it perform then you’re doing something horribly wrong.