As a note, there are actually new tunables for some of this: dirty_bytes, and dirty_background_bytes. With them, you can match them better to the actual size of your controller write cache so you can avoid page flush storms causing IO stalls.
That sounds interesting. How do you identify a page flush storm?
Mr. Nielsen's setup actually looks pretty darn good. It's my personal opinion he might run into some IO waits if he plans to use this for heavy OLTP, thanks to having only 8 spindles in his RAID1+0, but he may eventually grow into a SAN. That's fine. It's a good starting point.
Cool - thanks, again, for the review, Shaun.
Cheers,
Jan
-- Shaun Thomas OptionsHouse | 141 W. Jackson Blvd. | Suite 500 | Chicago IL, 60604 312-444-8534