Recovery of a database system by taking the database system offline is initiated. Thereafter, recovery operations specified by a redo log of the database system are replayed. During such replay, updates to pages implicated by the recovery operations are blocked. In parallel to such blocking, modified pages are adaptively flushed to physical disk storage using a factor that is based on a number of pages written to the physical disk storage and a number of write I/O operations as part of the flushing of the modified pages. Subsequently, the database system is brought online after all of the recovery operations are replayed.