Re: importance of fast disks with pg

Thomas Finneid wrote:
> Hi
>
> During the somes I did I noticed that it does not necessarily seem to be
> true that one needs the fastest disks to have a pg system that is fast.
>
> It seems to me that its more important to:
> - choose the correct methods to use for the operation
> - tune the pg memory settings
> - tune/disable pg xlog/wal etc
>
> It also seems to me that fast disks are more important for db systems of
> the OLTP type applications with real concurrency of both readers and
> writes across many, possibly larger, tables etc.
>
> Are the above statements close to having any truth in them?
>
> regards
>
> thomas

I'd say that "it depends".  We run an OLAP workload on 350+ gigs of database on
a system with 64GB of RAM.  I can tell you for certain that fetching non-cached
data is very sensitive to disk throughput!

Different types of workloads will find different bottlenecks in the system..

-Dan