Re: [PERFORM] Quad processor options

2004-05-18 Thread Marty Scholes
After reading the replies to this, it is clear that this is a Lintel-centric question, but I will throw in my experience. I am curious if there are any real life production quad processor setups running postgresql out there. Yes. We are running a 24/7 operation on a quad CPU Sun V880. Since

Re: [PERFORM] Quad processor options - summary

2004-05-14 Thread Mark Kirkwood
I would recommend trying out several stripe sizes, and making your own measurements. A while ago I was involved in building a data warehouse system (Oracle, DB2) and after several file and db benchmark exercises we used 256K stripes, as these gave the best overall performance results for both

Re: [PERFORM] Quad processor options

2004-05-13 Thread Andrew McMillan
On Tue, 2004-05-11 at 15:46 -0700, Paul Tuckfield wrote: - the cache column shows that linux is using 2.3G for cache. (way too much) you generally want to give memory to postgres to keep it close to the user, not leave it unused to be claimed by linux cache (need to leave *some* for linux

Off Topic - Re: [PERFORM] Quad processor options - summary

2004-05-13 Thread Greg Spiegelberg
This is somthing I wish more of us did on the lists. The list archives have solutions and workarounds for every variety of problem but very few summary emails exist. A good example of this practice is in the sun-managers mailling list. The original poster sends a SUMMARY reply to the list with

Re: [PERFORM] Quad processor options - summary

2004-05-13 Thread Paul Tuckfield
One big caveat re. the SAME striping strategy, is that readahead can really hurt an OLTP you. Mind you, if you're going from a few disks to a caching array with many disks, it'll be hard to not have a big improvement But if you push the envelope of the array with a SAME configuration,

Re: [PERFORM] Quad processor options

2004-05-12 Thread Manfred Koizar
On Tue, 11 May 2004 15:46:25 -0700, Paul Tuckfield [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: - the cache column shows that linux is using 2.3G for cache. (way too much) There is no such thing as way too much cache. you generally want to give memory to postgres to keep it close to the user, Yes, but only a

Re: [ADMIN] [PERFORM] Quad processor options

2004-05-12 Thread scott.marlowe
On Wed, 12 May 2004, Grega Bremec wrote: ...and on Tue, May 11, 2004 at 03:02:24PM -0600, scott.marlowe used the keyboard: If you get the LSI megaraid, make sure you're running the latest megaraid 2 driver, not the older, slower 1.18 series. If you are running linux, look for the

[PERFORM] Quad processor options - summary

2004-05-12 Thread Bjoern Metzdorf
Hi, at first, many thanks for your valuable replies. On my quest for the ultimate hardware platform I'll try to summarize the things I learned. - This is our current setup: Hardware: Dual Xeon DP 2.4 on a TYAN S2722-533 with HT enabled

Re: [PERFORM] Quad processor options

2004-05-11 Thread Rob Sell
-Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Bjoern Metzdorf Sent: Tuesday, May 11, 2004 3:11 PM To: scott.marlowe Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Pgsql-Admin (E-mail) Subject: Re: [PERFORM] Quad processor options scott.marlowe wrote: Next drives I'll buy

Re: [PERFORM] Quad processor options

2004-05-11 Thread J. Andrew Rogers
On Tue, 2004-05-11 at 12:06, Bjoern Metzdorf wrote: Has anyone experiences with quad Xeon or quad Opteron setups? I am looking at the appropriate boards from Tyan, which would be the only option for us to buy such a beast. The 30k+ setups from Dell etc. don't fit our budget. I am

Re: [PERFORM] Quad processor options

2004-05-11 Thread scott.marlowe
On Tue, 11 May 2004, Allan Wind wrote: On 2004-05-11T15:29:46-0600, scott.marlowe wrote: The other nice thing about the LSI cards is that you can install 1 and the act like one big RAID array. i.e. install two cards with a 20 drive RAID0 then make a RAID1 across them, and if one or the

Re: [PERFORM] Quad processor options

2004-05-11 Thread spied
BM see my other mail. BM We are running Linux, Kernel 2.4. As soon as the next debian version BM comes out, I'll happily switch to 2.6 :) it's very simple to use 2.6 with testing version, but if you like woody - you can simple install several packets from testing or backports.org if you think

Re: [PERFORM] Quad processor options

2004-05-11 Thread Paul Tuckfield
it's very good to understand specific choke points you're trying to address by upgrading so you dont get disappointed. Are you truly CPU constrained, or is it memory footprint or IO thruput that makes you want to upgrade? IMO The best way to begin understanding system choke points is vmstat

Re: [PERFORM] Quad processor options

2004-05-11 Thread Bjoern Metzdorf
Anjan Dave wrote: We use XEON Quads (PowerEdge 6650s) and they work nice, provided you configure the postgres properly. Dell is the cheapest quad you can buy i think. You shouldn't be paying 30K unless you are getting high CPU-cache on each processor and tons of memory. good to hear, I tried

Re: [PERFORM] Quad processor options

2004-05-11 Thread Bjoern Metzdorf
scott.marlowe wrote: Well, from what I've read elsewhere on the internet, it would seem the Opterons scale better to 4 CPUs than the basic Xeons do. Of course, the exception to this is SGI's altix, which uses their own chipset and runs the itanium with very good memory bandwidth. This is

Re: [PERFORM] Quad processor options

2004-05-11 Thread Anjan Dave
/2004 4:28 PM To: Anjan Dave Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Pgsql-Admin (E-mail) Subject: Re: [PERFORM] Quad processor options Anjan Dave wrote: We use XEON Quads (PowerEdge 6650s) and they work nice, provided you configure

Re: [PERFORM] Quad processor options

2004-05-11 Thread scott.marlowe
On Tue, 11 May 2004, Bjoern Metzdorf wrote: scott.marlowe wrote: Well, from what I've read elsewhere on the internet, it would seem the Opterons scale better to 4 CPUs than the basic Xeons do. Of course, the exception to this is SGI's altix, which uses their own chipset and runs

Re: [PERFORM] Quad processor options

2004-05-11 Thread Bjoern Metzdorf
Paul Tuckfield wrote: Would you mind forwarding the output of vmstat 10 120 under peak load period? (I'm asusming this is linux or unix variant) a brief description of what is happening during the vmstat sample would help a lot too. see my other mail. We are running Linux, Kernel 2.4. As soon

Re: [PERFORM] Quad processor options

2004-05-11 Thread Bjoern Metzdorf
Anjan Dave wrote: Did you mean to say the trigger-based clustering solution is loading the dual CPUs 60-70% right now? No, this is without any triggers involved. Performance will not be linear with more processors, but it does help with more processes. We haven't benchmarked it, but we

Re: [PERFORM] Quad processor options

2004-05-11 Thread Bjoern Metzdorf
scott.marlowe wrote: Next drives I'll buy will certainly be 15k scsi drives. Better to buy more 10k drives than fewer 15k drives. Other than slightly faster select times, the 15ks aren't really any faster. Good to know. I'll remember that. In peak times we can get up to 700-800 connections at

Re: [PERFORM] Quad processor options

2004-05-11 Thread scott.marlowe
On Tue, 11 May 2004, Bjoern Metzdorf wrote: scott.marlowe wrote: Sure, adaptec makes one, so does lsi megaraid. Dell resells both of these, the PERC3DI and the PERC3DC are adaptec, then lsi in that order, I believe. We run the lsi megaraid with 64 megs battery backed cache. The LSI

Re: [PERFORM] Quad processor options

2004-05-11 Thread Paul Tuckfield
I'm confused why you say the system is 70% busy: the vmstat output shows 70% *idle*. The vmstat you sent shows good things and ambiguous things: - si and so are zero, so your not paging/swapping. Thats always step 1. you're fine. - bi and bo (physical IO) shows pretty high numbers for how

Re: [PERFORM] Quad processor options

2004-05-11 Thread Dennis Bjorklund
On Tue, 11 May 2004, Bjoern Metzdorf wrote: I am curious if there are any real life production quad processor setups running postgresql out there. Since postgresql lacks a proper replication/cluster solution, we have to buy a bigger machine. Du you run the latest version of PG? I've read

Re: [PERFORM] Quad processor options

2004-05-11 Thread Grega Bremec
...and on Tue, May 11, 2004 at 03:02:24PM -0600, scott.marlowe used the keyboard: If you get the LSI megaraid, make sure you're running the latest megaraid 2 driver, not the older, slower 1.18 series. If you are running linux, look for the dkms packaged version. dkms, (Dynamic Kernel