Re: linux server configuration

On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 6:20 AM, Sim Zacks <sim(at)compulab(dot)co(dot)il> wrote:
> We are about to build a new database server, our plan is to use Debian.
>
> Is there documentation of recommended server configurations for Linux, such
> as kernel parameters, preferred file system, etc that work best with
> postgresql?
>
> I'm not talking about the pg configuration, which I have seen a lot of
> documentation about, more on getting the OS ready.

My company has two identical PostgreSQL servers running on Debian
(Squeeze) & we didn't tune the kernel and left it as it was installed
by Debian. I partitioned the drives as 'ext4' & and the data is stored
on a iSCSI NAS (RAID 5) configuration. The servers have been rock
solid. Just be super careful that you don't blindly upgrade the server
(using apt-get upgrade) and accidentally swap from 8.4 > 9.0. I ran
into this problem and it was very messy. This is a PG issue however,
not a Debian issue. On a side note I've ran PostgreSQL 8.4 in a
production environment on the following:

- CentOS 5 64-bit
- RHEL 5 64-bit
- Arch Linux 64-bit
- Ubuntu 10.04 Server
- Slackware Linux 13 64-bit
- Gentoo Linux (Uggh) 64-bit

Out of all those distributions, I can honestly say that between Arch
Linux and Debian, no other distribution comes close.