Benchmarks

Hi all,

I'm really glad to see all the test results people are posting here. In
fact, I used info from the archives to put together our first "big"
database host:

-Tyan dual-core/dual-cpu mainboard (
-One Opteron 270 2.0GHz (although our vendor gave us two for some reason)
-Chenbro 3U case (RM31212B) - OK, but not very well thought-out
-8 Seagate SATA drives (yes, we stuck with our vendor of choice, WD
Raptors may have been a better choice)
-3Ware 9550SX-12MI
-2GB RAM (we'll get more when we need it)

So this thing is sitting next to my desk and I'd like to see just how this
compares to other hardware. We already know that it will blow away our
normal dual-xeon 1Us with just two U320 drives on Adaptec 2120s ZCR cards.
We also know that for what this box will be doing (mailing list archives
with msgs stored in Postgres) it's going to be more than enough for the
next few years...

So what are people using to get a general feel for the bang/buck ratio?
I've toyed with Bonnie, IOZone and simple "dd" writes. I'd like to go a
little further and actually hit Postgres to see how the entire system
performs. My reasons are, in no particular order:

-to learn something (general and pgsql tuning)
-to help guide future database server builds
-to take the benchmark data and share it somewhere

The first one is obvious. Matching software to hardware is really hard
and there aren't too many people that can do it well.

The second is a pretty big deal - we've been doing all 1U builds and
currently spread our load amongst individual db servers that also do the
web front end for mailing list management. This has worked OK, but we may
want to peel off the db section and start moving towards two large boxes
like this with one replicating the other as a backup.

That last one is a stickler. I've seen so much data posted on this list,
is there any project in the works to collect this? It seems like some
RAID hardware just totally sucks (cough *Adaptec* cough). Having a site
that listed results for the more common benchmarks and sorting it out by
hardware would help reduce the number of people that get burned by buying
overpriced/underperforming RAID controllers/SANs.

Any thoughts on all this?

I'll be throwing in some quick stats on the box described above later
today... At first glance, the 3Ware controller is really looking like an
excellent value.

Thanks,

Charles