Re: [PERFORM] ok you all win what is best opteron (I dont want a hosed system

2005-05-15 Thread Greg Stark

William Yu [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

 It turns out the latency in a 2xDC setup is just so much lower and most apps
 like lower latency than higher bandwidth.

You haven't tested anything about most apps. You tested what the SpecFoo
apps prefer. If you're curious about which Postgres prefers you'll have to
test with Postgres.

I'm not sure whether it will change the conclusion but I expect Postgres will
like bandwidth better than random benchmarks do.


-- 
greg


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Re: [PERFORM] ok you all win what is best opteron (I dont want a hosed system again)

2005-05-14 Thread Joel Fradkin
Thank you much for the info.
I will take a look. I think the prices I have been seeing may exclude us
getting another 4 proc box this soon. My boss asked me to get something in
the 15K range (I spent 30 on the Dell). 
The HP seemed to run around 30 but it had a lot more drives then the dell
(speced it with 14 10k drives).

I can and will most likely build it myself to try getting a bit more bang
for the buck and it is a second server so if it dies it should not be a
catastrophie.

FYI everyone using our system (after a week of dealing with many bugs) have
been saying how much they like the speed.
I did have to do a lot of creative ideas to get it working in a way that
appears faster to the client.
Stuff like the queries default to limit 50 and as they hit next I up the
limit (also a flag to just show all records and a count, it used to default
to that). The two worst queries (our case and audit applications) I created
denormalized files and maintain them through code. All reporting comes off
those and it is lightning fast.

I just want to say again thanks to everyone who has helped me in the past
few months.

Joel Fradkin
 
Wazagua, Inc.
2520 Trailmate Dr
Sarasota, Florida 34243
Tel.  941-753-7111 ext 305
 
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-Original Message-
From: David Brown [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 
Sent: Friday, May 13, 2005 7:03 PM
To: Joel Fradkin
Cc: pgsql-performance@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: [PERFORM] ok you all win what is best opteron (I dont want a
hosed system again)

Joel Fradkin wrote:

 Is the battery backed cache good or bad for Postgres?

Battery-backed avoids corruption if you have an unexpected power loss. 
It's considered mandatory with large-cache write-back controllers if you 
can't afford to lose any data.

 They are telling me I can only get a duel channel card if I want 
 hardware raid 10 on the 14 drives.

 I can get two cards but it has to be 7 and 7 (software raid?) which 
 does not sound like it fixes my single point of failure (one of the 
 listers mentioned my current system has 3 such single points).

Sounds like you need to try another vendor. Are you aiming for two RAID 
10 arrays or one RAID 10 and one RAID 5?

 Any of you hardware gurus spell out the optimal machine (I am hoping 
 to be around 15K, might be able to go more if it's a huge difference, 
 I spent 30k on the Dell).

 I do not have to go HP, and after seeing the fail ratio from Monarch 
 from one lister I am bit scared shopping there.

There's unlikely to be many common components between their workstation 
and server offerings. You would expect case, power, graphics, 
motherboard, storage controller and drives to all be different. But I'd 
challenge that 50% failure stat anyway. Which components exactly? Hard 
drives? Power supplies?

 Was there a conclusion on where is best to get one (I really want two 
 one for development too).

Almost anyone can build a workstation or tower server, and almost anyone 
else can service it for you. It gets trickier when you're talking 2U and 
especially 1U. But really, these too can be maintained by anyone 
competent. So I wonder about some people's obsession with 
vendor-provided service.

Realistically, most Opteron solutions will use a Tyan motherboard (no 
idea if this includes HP). For 4-way systems, there's currently only the 
S4882, which includes an LSI dual channel SCSI controller. Different 
vendors get to use different cases and cooling solutions and pick a 
different brand/model of hard drive, but that's about it.

Tyan now also sells complete servers - hardly a stretch seeing they 
already make the most important bit (after the CPU). Given the level of 
interest in this forum, here's their list of US resellers:

http://www.tyan.com/products/html/us_alwa.html

If it's a tower server, build it yourself or pay someone to do it. It 
really isn't challenging for anyone knowledgeable about hardware.


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Re: [PERFORM] ok you all win what is best opteron (I dont want a hosed system again)

2005-05-14 Thread Josh Berkus
Joel,

 The two worst queries (our case and audit applications) I created
 denormalized files and maintain them through code. All reporting comes off
 those and it is lightning fast.

This can often be called for.  I'm working on a 400GB data warehouse right 
now, and almost *all* of our queries run from materialized aggregate tables.

-- 
--Josh

Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco

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Re: [PERFORM] ok you all win what is best opteron (I dont want a hosed system again)

2005-05-13 Thread Merlin Moncure
Joel wrote:
I have been following threads (in case you don't know I bought a 4 proc
Dell recently) and the Opteron seems the way to go.
I just called HP for a quote, but don't want to make any mistakes.
[snip]

At your level of play it's the DL585.
Have you checked out http://www.swt.com? 

Merlin

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