Re: Advantages and disadvantages of more than one dbserver

On Thu, 3 Jul 2003, Sam Barnett-Cormack wrote:

> On Thu, 3 Jul 2003, Daniel Seichter wrote:
>
> > Today memory isn't expensive so with 512MB I can be shure, every user on
> > this server might have enough to work without any timeout or waiting times
> > greater then 2 seconds.
>
> If the database is at all large, you really want more memory than that.
> I have a really quite large DB, but I am *really* struggling with 1GB

Note that running Postgresql on it's own server is a good idea if it's
currently sharing with an application server.  While some systems (Zope,
PHPNuke stuff) can run in little or no memory, most app servers eat up a
lot of memory that postgresql could use for cacheing.

We went from 512 Meg to 1.5 Gig and the change was tremendous.  That box
ran Apache/Postgresql/auth_ldap/LDAP and now has 800 Meg of cache mem and
about 120 Megs of buffer routinely.  I'd heartily recommend even a jump
from just 1 to 1.5 gig if you can make it.

Eventually we're planning on moving our postgresql database to a dedicated
server.  Basically we'll move all the other stuff off of the current all
in one box and leave the database with an older, slightly slow machine
all to itself.  Funny I'm thinking of dual PIII-750s as slow.