On Wed, Apr 26, 2006 at 07:30:49PM -0600, Benjamin Krajmalnik wrote: > I am about to take a system from testing into production. > > The system is a combination oltp/bi (network monitoring platform). > > We are currently inserting about 1 million rows per day, and will > increase to probably 5 million once it goes into full deployment. > > The current test production server is running Windows Server 2003, > PostgreSQL 8.1.3. > > Record insertion is done via an ODBC call to a stored procedure from a > Windows based host monitor. Make sure you're batching inserts with transactions. > It is currently running on a 3GHz Xeon HT, 2GB RAM, dual 72GB disks > running RAID 1. This server is a 1U without only 2 drive bays, so I > have a potential issue with drive space. > > As a result, I will be moving the db server to a Dell 1650 with 3 146GB > SCSI drives running RAID 0. System is a dual processor, 1.2GHz, with > 4GB RAM. 3 drive raid0 is likely to fail within 3-4 years, just so you know; unless it's not new hardware, in which case I'd expect something closer to 2 years (my general experience is that server HDs will last 4-6 years, so with 3 of them you're looking at a failure every ~2 years). You sure you want to trust a monitoring app to raid0? :) > Due to the amount of record insertions being performed, record insertion > speed is paramount - also because excessive execution time will have a > side effect of causing the monitoring agent to go stale. Some of the > users have mentioned that I will get better performance running under a > *nix OS. We are mostly a Microsoft OS house, but also run FreeBSD. I > am considering deploying with FreeBSD 6.0. I was wondering if anyone > has benchmarks showing speed of execution of PostgreSQL 8.1.3 under > Win2003 and FreeBSD 6.0. Also, are there any caveats or items I should > be aware of if running under FreeBSD? Any issues when running under a > multi-processor kernel? Anything in specific which I should include in > the kernel build to give me optimum performance for running PostgreSQL? > > Needless to say, I am a bit nervous of moving to FreeBSD since I have > not tested it in a production environment. Aside from some very large shops running FreeBSD (yahoo does I believe, and hotmail did for a long time, even after MS bought it), it's also a preferred OS by PostgreSQL developers. On the other hand we've only had Windows support for about 2 years and there's known windows-only issues. -- Jim C. Nasby, Sr. Engineering Consultant jnasby@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Pervasive Software http://pervasive.com work: 512-231-6117 vcard: http://jim.nasby.net/pervasive.vcf cell: 512-569-9461