Re: What HW / OS is recommeded

On Thu, 2004-12-16 at 19:10, Alex wrote:

> I actually am more interested to hear if there are an recommended
> systems or setups.
> Also with regard to 2/4 CPUs or 32/64 bit etc.

Sorry to have gotten off on a tangent there. Posts in the last year or
so to the -performance mailing list have shown the 64 bit AMD platform
to be the fastest X86 based platform around, and having 64 bit hardware
is nice for postgresql installations dealing with large data sets.

Generally, 2 CPUs is plenty. The fastest storage systems seems to be
SAN based, with large local RAID arrays with battery backed cache coming
in a close second. Once the RAID array or SAN device has enough drives,
putting things like the transaction log elsewhere have little effect.

But it's really all about what you're doing with your database. If
you're taking huge data sets and running statistical analysis with the
plR, you'll need lots of memory as well as plenty of CPU horsepower. If
you're handling thousands of simultaneous air line reservations, you'll
need lots of drives, and a fair number of CPUs, but probably not so much
memory. You may need clusters for one solution, but find one big server
is the answer to another problem.

There's no one simple answer, because there's no one simple problem.

But for most use cases, a dual AMD 64 bit CPU, 4 gigs of ram, and a half
a dozen hard drives is a good starting point.