Re: postgresql.conf

On Wed, 2004-12-22 at 09:15, John Cunningham wrote:
> Hey Guys,
>
> I am setting up a new dedicated Postgres server, and will serve about
> 60 databases to a web site serving 250,000 people at the rate of about
> 20,000 a day.  That may all be irrellevent though for the purposes of
> this conversation.
>

If you're gonna handle a lot of connections at the same time, look at
pgpool.  Also, the tuning docs at varlena are a must:

http://www.varlena.com/varlena/GeneralBits/Tidbits/perf.html

> The main thing about the application is that we're talking about lots
> and lots of little transactions and onyl a few big ones.
>
> The machine in question will do nothing but serve databases.  It's a
> dual 3.2Ghz Xeon with 100GB or 15K RPM RAID 5 and 8 GB of RAM.  I'd
> like to configure it to get the most out of the server possible as far
> as shared memory, sort memore, etc.  I haven't found a lot of
> documentation on this.

Battery backed cache on the hardware RAID controller is a must. RAID 1+0
may be a better choice than RAID 5, depending on your usage patterns.

> By the way, for some reason Postgres 7.4.x wouldn't install properly -
> had a problem with initdb - had to use 7.3.6

Please post the error messages you got and what OS / version of that OS
you're running, and any other relevant information you can think of.
7.4 is fairly stable, a failed install is something that generally
shouldn't happen, and when it does, it's usually not 7.4's fault
nowadays.