Re: postgres on a beowulf? (AMD)opteron?

On Monday 19 May 2003 22:58, george young wrote:
> Has anyone run postgres on a beowulf system?
>
> I'm shopping for a new server.  One candidate would be a
> quad opteron (64-bit AMD "hammer") machine.  Another approach might
> be a beowulf of single or dual opterons.  I imagine the beowulf
> would be a bit cheaper, and much more expandable, but what about
> the shared memory used by the postgres backends?  I gather that
> postgres uses shared memory to coordinate (locks?) between backends?

Postgresql will not run on beowulf at all since it is an MPI system and
postgresql can no span a single database across machines (yet). Further it
won't even run on mosix because mosix does not support shared memory across
machines.

>
> I have a smallish DB (pgdump|bzip2 -> 10MB), with ~45 users logged in
> using local X(python/gtk) postgres client apps.

Well, you haven't put how many transactions you do, but in general for that
sort of DB, a P-IV/512MB RAM and SCSI disk would be more than enough unless
you are doing really exotic things with data..

> [Next question is: has anyone used postgres on an opteron at all??]

Well, if it runs linux as good as anything else, postgresql will run as good
as anything else..:-)

HTH

 Shridhar