On 3/24/09 4:16 PM, "Scott Marlowe" <scott.marlowe@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 4:58 PM, Ron <rjpeace@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> At 02:47 PM 3/24/2009, Joe Uhl wrote: >> >>> Turns out we may have an opportunity to purchase a new database server >>> with this increased load. Seems that the best route, based on feedback to >>> this thread, is to go whitebox, get quad opterons, and get a very good disk >>> controller. >>> >>> Can anyone recommend a whitebox vendor? >> >> I'll 2nd the Aberdeen recommendation. I'll add Pogolinux to that list as >> well. >> >> >>> Is there a current controller anyone on this list has experience with that >>> they could recommend? >> >> The 2 best performing RAID controller vendors at this time are AMCC (AKA >> 3Ware) and Areca. >> In general, the 8+ port Areca's with their BB cache maxed outperform every >> other controller available. I personally have had rather bad performance experiences with 3Ware 9550/9650 SATA cards. I have no experience with the AMCC SAS stuff though. Adaptec demolished the 9650 on arrays larger than 4 drives, and Areca will do better at the very high end. However, if CPU is the issue for this particular case, then the RAID controller details are less significant. I don't know how much data you have, but don't forget the option of SSDs, or a mix of hard drives and SSDs for different data. Ideally, you would want the OS to just extend its pagecache onto a SSD, but only OpenSolaris can do that right now and it is rather new (needs to be persistent across reboots). http://blogs.sun.com/brendan/entry/test http://blogs.sun.com/brendan/entry/l2arc_screenshots >> >> >>> This will be a bigger purchase so will be doing research and benchmarking >>> but any general pointers to a vendor/controller greatly appreciated. >> >> Be =very= careful to thoroughly bench both the AMD and Intel CPU options. >> It is far from clear which is the better purchase. > > My anecdotal experience has been that the Opterons stay afloat longer > as load increases, but I haven't had machines with similar enough > hardware to really test that. > One may want to note that Intel's next generation servers are due out within 45 days from what I can sense ('Q2' traditionally means ~April 1 for Intel when on time). These should be a rather significant bump for a database as they adopt the AMD / Alpha style memory-controller-on-CPU architecture and add a lot of cache. Other relevant improvements: increased performance on compare-and-swap operations, the return of hyper threading, and ridiculous memory bandwidth per CPU (3 DDR3 memory channels per CPU). >> I'd be very interested to see the results of your research and benchmarks >> posted here on pgsql-performance. > > Me too. I'm gonna spend some time this summer benchmarking and tuning > the database servers that I pretty much had to burn in and put in > production this year due to time pressures. > > -- > Sent via pgsql-performance mailing list (pgsql-performance@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) > To make changes to your subscription: > http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-performance > -- Sent via pgsql-performance mailing list (pgsql-performance@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-performance
