Re: Scaling further up

On Mar 2, 2004, at 5:36 PM, scott.marlowe wrote:

> Some folks on the list have experience with Postgresql on Solaris, and
> they generally say they use Solaris not for performance reasons, but
> for
> reliability reasons. I.e. the bigger Sun hardware is fault tolerant.
>
Solaris isn't nearly as bad for PG as it used to be.

But as you say - the #1 reason to use sun is reliability. (In my case,
it was because we had a giant sun laying around :)

I'm trying to remember exactly what happens.. but I know on sun if it
had a severe memory error it kills off processes with data on that dimm
(Since it has no idea if it is bad or not. Thanks to ECC this is very
rare, but it can happen.). I want to say if a CPU dies any processes
running on it at that moment are also killed. but the more I think
about that th emore I don't think that is the case.

As for x86.. if ram or a cpu goes bad you're SOL.

Although opterons are sexy you need to remember they really are brand
new cpus - I'm sure AMD has done tons of testing but sun ultrasparc's
have been in every situation conceivable in production. If you are
going to really have thousands of users you probably want to bet the
farm on something proven.

lots and lots of spindles
lots and lots of ram

You may also want to look into a replication solution as a hot backup.

--
Jeff Trout <jeff(at)jefftrout(dot)com>
http://www.jefftrout.com/
http://www.stuarthamm.net/