Re: 8 way Intel Xeon system

On 27 Aug 2003 at 14:07, Castle, Lindsay wrote:
> I'm mainly interested in what I should concentrate on from a
> Linux/PostgreSQL config point of view to see if we can take advantage of the
> extra CPUs. - Yes it's overkill but this is a piece of surplus hardware we
> don't have to buy.

First of all whatever you do, add multiple connections using a middle layer.
That will keep your CPU busy.

Of course there are few things need to be done over single connection but this
should help at least in some scenarios.

> Perhaps some may say Linux isn't the best option for an 8 CPU server but
> this is what I have to work with for reasons we won't get into :-)

I think if you can afford a performance benchmark trial, give 2.6.0-testx a
try. They should be much better than 2.4.x.

> The current usage is along the lines of a few thousands updates spread over
> the space of a few hours in the morning then followed by a thousand select
> queries to do some reporting.

In case of such IO intensive and update/delete heavy load, might be a good idea
to move WAL to a separate SCSI channel. I believe merely moving it to another
drive would not yield as much boost.

> Currently RedHat 9 with PostgreSQL 7.3.2 installed.

Get 7.4CVS head. and don't forget to use a autovacuum daemon. It's in contrib
dir.

HTH

Bye
 Shridhar

--
Ogden's Law:    The sooner you fall behind, the more time you have to catch up.