Re: Open request for benchmarking input

On Sun, 27 Nov 2005, Andreas Pflug wrote:

> David Lang wrote:
>>
>> Postgres needs to work on the low end stuff as well as the high end stuff
>> or people will write their app to work with things that DO run on low end
>> hardware and they spend much more money then is needed to scale the
>> hardware up rather then re-writing their app.
>
> I agree that pgsql runs on low end stuff, but a dual Opteron with 2x15kSCSI
> isn't low end, is it? The CPU/IO performance isn't balanced for the total
> cost, you probably could get a single CPU/6x15kRPM machine for the same price
> delivering better TP performance in most scenarios.
>
> Benchmarks should deliver results that are somewhat comparable. If performed
> on machines that don't deliver a good CPU/IO power balance for the type of DB
> load being tested, they're misleading and hardly usable for comparision
> purposes, and even less for learning how to configure a decent server since
> you might have to tweak some parameters in an unusual way.

a couple things to note,

first, when running benchmarks there is a need for client machines to
stress the database, these machines are what are available to be clients
as well as servers.

second, the smaller machines are actually about what I would spec out for
a high performance database that's reasonably small, a couple of the boxes
have 144G drives, if they are setup as raid1 then the boxes would be
reasonable to use for a database up to 50G or larger (assuming you need
space on the DB server to dump the database, up to 100G or so if you
don't)

David Lang