If you are IO-bound, you might want to consider using SSD. A single SSD could easily give you more IOPS than 16 15k SAS in RAID 10. --- On Wed, 12/8/10, Benjamin Krajmalnik <kraj@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > From: Benjamin Krajmalnik <kraj@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> > Subject: Hardware recommendations > To: pgsql-performance@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx > Date: Wednesday, December 8, 2010, 6:03 PM > I need to build a new high > performance server to replace our current production > database server. > The current server is a SuperMicro 1U with 2 RAID-1 > containers (one for data, one for log, SAS - data is 600GB, > Logs 144GB), 16GB of RAM, running 2 quad core processors > (E5405 @ 2GHz), Adaptec 5405 Controller with BBU. I am > already having serious I/O bottlenecks with iostat -x > showing extended periods where the disk subsystem on the > data partition (the one with all the random i/o) at over 85% > busy. The system is running FreeBSD 7.2 amd64 and > PostgreSQL 8.4.4 on amd64-portbld-freebsd7.2, compiled by > GCC cc (GCC) 4.2.1 20070719 [FreeBSD], 64-bit. > Currently I have about 4GB of shared memory allocated to > PostgreSQL. Database is currently about 80GB, with about > 60GB being in partitioned tables which get rotated nightly > to purge old data (sort of like a circular buffer of > historic data). > > I was looking at one of the machines which Aberdeen has > (the X438), and was planning on something along the lines > of 96GB RAM with 16 SAS drives (15K). If I create a RAID > 10 (stripe of mirrors), leaving 2 hot spares, should I still > place the logs in a separate RAID-1 mirror, or can they be > left on the same RAID-10 container? > On the processor front, are there advantages to going to X > series processors as opposed to the E series (especially > since I am I/O bound)? Is anyone running this type of > hardware, specially on FreeBSD? Any opinions, especially > concerning the Areca controllers which they use? > > The new box would ideally be built with the latest released > version of FreeBSD, PG 9.x. Also, is anyone running the > 8.x series of FreeBSD with PG 9 in a high throughput > production environment? I will be upgrading one of our > test servers in one week to this same configuration to test > out, but just wanted to make sure there aren't any caveats > others have experienced, especially as it pertains with the > autovacuum not launching worker processes which I have > experienced. > > Best regards, > > Benjamin > > -- > 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
