Re: Postgres & large tables on average machine

Your UDMA 33 bus will limit disk reads to 33 Mbytes/sec so there is your
first bottleneck. Get a 66 mhz PCI ide adapter (Promise is cheap) and that
will increase your disk speed dramatically.
Also you won't be able to do much with 128 Mb of ram, put in as much as you
can. That box is likely 66 mhz front side bus so that will be a bottleneck
once you max out the ram.

If you are planning on that table growing you will need a bigger box with
scsi/raid and lots of ram. Biggest factor when the table gets above the
available ram though is how fast you can pipe data though the processor from
the disk. Get something like a dual athlon motherboard that is a big front
side bus and use a 64 bit, 66 mhz scsi raid controller.

On the other hand, if you don't want to go big then at least get an PCI IDE
controller and put another 384M ram in - it will make a big difference.
Don't forget to (man) hdparm to maximize your I/O.

-----Original Message-----
From: pgsql-admin-owner(at)postgresql(dot)org
[mailto:pgsql-admin-owner(at)postgresql(dot)org]On Behalf Of Peter Eisentraut
Sent: Friday, March 29, 2002 10:43 AM
To: Nicholay P. Chuprynin
Cc: pgsql-admin(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: Re: [ADMIN] Postgres & large tables on average machine

Nicholay P. Chuprynin writes:

> Resently I had to create and manage the (relatively) large table.
> In the mean time it's about 8 million rows, and surely will grow above
> this size.
> The problem is that queries takes absolutely not acceptable time.
> Database located on average Celeron 400 machine with 128 Mb of RAM and
> UDMA 33 capable IDE drive.
> I run PostgreSQL 7.1 on Debian Linux with 2.4.18 kernel.
> My question is what could be done in order to improve the performance?
> I mean, is that normal behavior for Postgres on such computer or I
> encounter a misconfiguration?

It is perfectly normal for queries to take an absolutely unacceptable
amount of time, but without providing any sort of detail about the
involved schema and data it's impossible to figure out if the performance
could be improved.

--
Peter Eisentraut peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net

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