Re: [PERFORM] Hardware recommendations

2010-12-09 Thread Marti Raudsepp
On Thu, Dec 9, 2010 at 04:28, Scott Marlowe scott.marl...@gmail.com wrote:
 On Wed, Dec 8, 2010 at 5:03 PM, Benjamin Krajmalnik k...@servoyant.com 
 wrote:
 My biggest concern with SSD drives is their life expectancy,

 Generally that's not a big issue, especially as the SSDs get larger.
 Being able to survive a power loss without corruption is more of an
 issue, so if you go SSD get ones with a supercapacitor that can write
 out the data before power down.

I agree with Benjamin here. Even if you put multiple SSD drives into a
RAID array, all the drives get approximately the same write load and
thus will likely wear out and fail at the same time!

 As for the Areca controllers, I haven't tested them with the latest
 drivers or firmware, but we would routinely get 180 to 460 days of
 uptime between lockups

That sucks! But does a BBU even help with SSDs? The flash eraseblock
is larger than the RAID cache unit size anyway, so as far as I can
tell, it might not save you in the case of a power loss.

Any thoughts whether software RAID on SSD is a good idea?

Regards,
Marti

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Re: [PERFORM] Hardware recommendations

2010-12-09 Thread John W Strange
If you are worried about wearing out the SSD's long term get a larger SSD and 
create the partition smaller than the disk, this will reduce the write 
amplification and extend the life of the drive.

TRIM support also helps lower write amplification issues by not requiring as 
many pages to do the writes, and improve performance as well!

As a test I bought 4 cheap 40GB drives in a raid0 software stripe, I have run 
it for almost a year now with a lot of random IO.  I portioned them as 30GB 
drives, leaving an extra 25% spare area to reduce the write amplification, I 
can still get over 600MB/sec on these for a whopping cost of $400 and a little 
of my time.

SSD's can be very useful, but you have to be aware of the shortcomings and how 
to overcome them.

- John

-Original Message-
From: Marti Raudsepp [mailto:ma...@juffo.org] 
Sent: Thursday, December 09, 2010 6:09 AM
To: Scott Marlowe
Cc: Benjamin Krajmalnik; John W Strange; pgsql-performance@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: [PERFORM] Hardware recommendations

On Thu, Dec 9, 2010 at 04:28, Scott Marlowe scott.marl...@gmail.com wrote:
 On Wed, Dec 8, 2010 at 5:03 PM, Benjamin Krajmalnik k...@servoyant.com 
 wrote:
 My biggest concern with SSD drives is their life expectancy,

 Generally that's not a big issue, especially as the SSDs get larger.
 Being able to survive a power loss without corruption is more of an
 issue, so if you go SSD get ones with a supercapacitor that can write
 out the data before power down.

I agree with Benjamin here. Even if you put multiple SSD drives into a
RAID array, all the drives get approximately the same write load and
thus will likely wear out and fail at the same time!

 As for the Areca controllers, I haven't tested them with the latest
 drivers or firmware, but we would routinely get 180 to 460 days of
 uptime between lockups

That sucks! But does a BBU even help with SSDs? The flash eraseblock
is larger than the RAID cache unit size anyway, so as far as I can
tell, it might not save you in the case of a power loss.

Any thoughts whether software RAID on SSD is a good idea?

Regards,
Marti

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Re: [PERFORM] libpq vs ODBC

2010-12-09 Thread Pierre C

On Thu, 09 Dec 2010 06:51:26 +0100, Alex Goncharov
alex-goncha...@comcast.net wrote:


,--- You/Divakar (Wed, 8 Dec 2010 21:17:22 -0800 (PST)) *
| So it means there will be visible impact if the nature of DB  
interaction is DB

| insert/select. We do that mostly in my app.

You can't say a visible impact unless you can measure it in your
specific application.

Let's say ODBC takes 10 times of .001 sec for libpq.  Is this a
visible impact?


Well you have to consider server and client resources separately. If you  
waste a bit of CPU time on the client by using a suboptimal driver, that  
may be a problem, or not. It you waste server resources, that is much more  
likely to be a problem, because it is multiplied by the number of clients.  
I don't know about the specifics of ODBC performance, but for instance  
php's PDO driver's handling of prepared statements with postgres comes up  
as an example of what not to do.


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Re: [PERFORM] Hardware recommendations

2010-12-09 Thread alan bryan
On Wed, Dec 8, 2010 at 3:03 PM, Benjamin Krajmalnik k...@servoyant.com wrote:
 I need to build a new high performance server to replace our current 
 production database server.


We run FreeBSD 8.1 with PG 8.4 (soon to upgrade to PG 9).  Hardware is:

Supermicro 2u 6026T-NTR+
2x  Intel Xeon E5520 Nehalem 2.26GHz Quad-Core (8 cores total), 48GB RAM

We use ZFS and use SSDs for both the log device and L2ARC.  All disks
and SSDs are behind a 3ware with BBU in single disk mode.  This has
given us the capacity of the spinning disks with (mostly) the
performance of the SSDs.

The main issue we've had is that if the server is rebooted performance
is horrible for a few minutes until the various memory and ZFS caches
are warmed up.  Luckily, that doesn't happen very often.

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