Re: Advantages and disadvantages of more than one dbserver

On Thu, 3 Jul 2003, scott.marlowe wrote:

> On Thu, 3 Jul 2003, Sam Barnett-Cormack wrote:
>
> > On Thu, 3 Jul 2003, scott.marlowe wrote:
> >
> > > 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.
> >
> > I want either a seperate (high-ish spec, high memory) box, or to not
> > have to use my workstation as a server :) But I don't think my employers
> > will put any more money into this project until it's fully finished.
>
> Well, always look at memory and drives.  If you can add memory to your
> workstation is will be a much faster server.  Adding drives into a RAID1
> 1+0 or 5 set can provide a performance increase too.

We'll be looking at more performance boosts once the system is mature.
We already have the DB on a dedicated drive, on a dedicated controller.
Moving to a RAID 1 config with another 120GB drive would be good. The DB
on disk currently takes up about 35GB with only 1 quarters data, but
growth with longer timespans should be minimal as the DB is very well
normalised. RAID 5 not an option in the current box, as there are not
enough bays in the (crappy RM desktop) case, and we'd have to use
software RAID or buy a more epensive controller, and probably move to
SCSI, which would be expensive enough to justify buying a small
dedicated box instead, which would be better in many ways. When ones
workstation is also supposed to be a high-availability server, certain
things become difficult.

--

Sam Barnett-Cormack
Software Developer                           |  Student of Physics & Maths
UK Mirror Service (http://www.mirror.ac.uk)  |  Lancaster University