Re: New system recommendations

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(at)pervasive(dot)com
Pervasive Software http://pervasive.com work: 512-231-6117
vcard: http://jim.nasby.net/pervasive.vcf cell: 512-569-9461