Re: PostgreSQL on system with root as only user

On Aug 30, 2006, at 13:58 , Brandon Aiken wrote:

> I haven't got any numbers (or a USB stick I can test with at the
> moment)
> but USB is going to be a bottleneck for read and write performance.
> Unless you're accessing very small amounts of data or running small
> queries, I would expect performance to be pretty poor.

Indeed, that's pretty much our scenario- a rack-mounted Linux box
storing mostly inconsequential data (auth creds) with a flash drive-
quasi-embedded, I guess.

>
> If your data set is so small, why do you need a full RDBMS instead of
> flat data/text files or SQLite?  If you're not concerned about disk
> media failure, why do you need a transactional DB?  It seems like
> putting a deadbolt on a screen door.

MySQL and SQLite have terrible concurrent performance with
transactions. We would also like to take advantage of database-level
replication instead of our fragile home-grown thing for load-sharing
and failover.

>
> It might work just great for your device, of course, but I would not
> expect it to scale well at all.

There are some things I can do- for example, fsync should probably
just be off. I guess I should simply go ahead and try it. Thanks for
the discussion!

-M