I've wondered whether this would work for a read-mostly application: Buy a big RAM machine, like 64GB, with a crappy little single disk. Build the database, then make a really big RAM disk, big enough to hold the DB and the WAL. Then build a duplicate DB on another machine with a decent disk (maybe a 4-disk RAID10), and turn on WAL logging.
The system would be blazingly fast, and you'd just have to be sure before you shut it off to shut down Postgres and copy the RAM files back to the regular disk. And if you didn't, you could always recover from the backup. Since it's a read-mostly system, the WAL logging bandwidth wouldn't be too high, so even a modest machine would be able to keep up. Any thoughts? Craig -- Sent via pgsql-performance mailing list (pgsql-performance@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-performance
