On Sun, 27 Nov 2005, Andreas Pflug wrote:
David Lang wrote:
Postgres needs to work on the low end stuff as well as the high end stuff
or people will write their app to work with things that DO run on low end
hardware and they spend much more money then is needed to scale the
hardware up rather then re-writing their app.
I agree that pgsql runs on low end stuff, but a dual Opteron with 2x15kSCSI
isn't low end, is it? The CPU/IO performance isn't balanced for the total
cost, you probably could get a single CPU/6x15kRPM machine for the same price
delivering better TP performance in most scenarios.
Benchmarks should deliver results that are somewhat comparable. If performed
on machines that don't deliver a good CPU/IO power balance for the type of DB
load being tested, they're misleading and hardly usable for comparision
purposes, and even less for learning how to configure a decent server since
you might have to tweak some parameters in an unusual way.
a couple things to note,
first, when running benchmarks there is a need for client machines to
stress the database, these machines are what are available to be clients
as well as servers.
second, the smaller machines are actually about what I would spec out for
a high performance database that's reasonably small, a couple of the boxes
have 144G drives, if they are setup as raid1 then the boxes would be
reasonable to use for a database up to 50G or larger (assuming you need
space on the DB server to dump the database, up to 100G or so if you
don't)
David Lang
