Re: Postgres configuration for 64 CPUs, 128 GB RAM...

On Tue, 17 > We have the oppotunity to benchmark our application on a
large server. I
> have to prepare the Postgres configuration and I'd appreciate some
> comments on it as I am not experienced with servers of such a scale.
> Moreover the configuration should be fail-proof as I won't be able to
> attend the tests.
>
> Our application (java + perl) and Postgres will run on the same server,
> whereas the application activity is low when Postgres has large
> transactions to process.

Please, can you be more specific about your application :

- what does it do ?
- what kind of workload does it generate ?
[ie: many concurrent small queries (website) ; few huge queries,
reporting, warehousing, all of the above, something else ?]
- percentage and size of update queries ?
- how many concurrent threads / connections / clients do you serve on a
busy day ?
(I don't mean online users on a website, but ACTIVE concurrent database
connections)

I assume you find your current server is too slow or foresee it will
become too slow soon and want to upgrade, so :

- what makes the current server's performance inadequate ? is it IO, CPU,
RAM, a mix ? which proportions in the mix ?

This is very important. If you go to the dealer and ask "I need a better
vehicle", he'll sell you a Porsche. But if you say "I need a better vehcle
to carry two tons of cinderblocks" he'll sell you something else I guess.
Same with database servers. You could need some humongous CPU power, but
you might as well not. Depends.

> There is a large gap between our current produtcion server (Linux, 4GB
> RAM, 4 cpus) and the benchmark server; one of the target of this
> benchmark is to verify the scalability of our application.

Define scalability. (no this isn't a joke, I mean, you know your
application, how would you like it to "scale" ? How do you think it will
scale ? Why ? What did you do so it would scale well ? etc.)