Re: Fast Inserts and Hardware Questions

adb wrote:
>
> Have you done any benchmarks with a prototype of your application.
>
> Based off of some of the numbers I've been seeing with my testing,
> I would not be surprised if a single pIII 1ghz box with a decent disk
> (ata 100 or scsi 160) would handle the load you describe and is way
> cheaper than some big smp box.  A dual pIII with a decent raid card
> would get you even farther.  Certainly these are not as expandable as
> other options out there but they are worth a look.
>
> What I would be most concered about is a table that grows by a few million
> rows a week, that to me seems like a liability in itself since
> maintenance on that table will get pretty slow after a few months.
>
> Alex.

Right now I have a prototype running on a dual PIII 533 MHz with a scsi
raid and I am getting 2 inserts / second maximum. (To be fair there is
some overhead I did not mention on each insert but not a lot). Now if
WAL or disabling fsync() can get me a 10x speedup that's 20/second which
is almost what I need.  Perhaps finding a way to drop some of my index's
and other overhead could get me to 30/second - my minimum.

But yes - it seems that CPU power is the least of my worries.  I just
need really fast disks and 7.1 to come out soon.