Re: [GENERAL] performance comparisons...

>Hello, I'm currently looking for any documentation anyone on the list
>knows of that shows the performance of Linux on any Intel hardware
>(preferrably a dual PII) for serving web/database services. I know I'm
>stretching the off-topicness here, but please bear with me. I promise
>I'll have some more on topic questions soon.
> I built my first web/database integration system about a year ago using
>PostgreSQL. It went so well that I'm turning to it again for a large
>(25,000) user project. PostgreSQL will be used to maintain user
>information and perform other smaller tasks for our customers.
> What I'm looking for right now is any sort of benchmark that shows how
>much traffic a dual PII machine, running Linux, can handle while
>processing database transaction with PostgreSQL. Even any document that
>shows how many hits per minute a machine like this could take serving flat
>HTML documents would come in handy. I have to sell this system (hardware,
>OS, and PostgreSQL) to a customer tomorrow and am looking for anything
>that will convince them that this machine is going to be fast enough.
> The machine will also have SCSI and anywhere from 128 - 256 MB of RAM.
> Thanks for any help,
> -M@

This is strictly anecdotal. We have a PII 266 with 128MB and an IDE HD
running postgres through an apache module. The server is also handling
email and other web sites. The primary purpose for Postgres was for
accepting and checking registrations in a database. We are currently
handling 700 registrations per day with a peak of 2300. We validate about
1200 users per day with a peak of 6500. We also keep daily counters of site
visits (requests for the left pane in a frame) and page views (requests for
the right pane). For each day/category there is a integer in a row that is
incremented. The visit counter averages 1500 per day with a peak of 7000.

The page view counters have been problematic. We only ran them for 8 days
and during that time the server would often have problems. In that period
we had a peak of 34000 and averaged 18000. This was a peak time for the
whole server and I don't have a difinitive identification of the cause of
the problems. The whole server became unstable. It may have been just a
limit on kenel file handles (I have since increased them from 1024 to 4096).
This was Postgres 6.3.2 which had a compiled default limit of 32
connections. During peak times we had 30 to 60 apache servers running but I
doubt they were all simultaneasly connected. Its possible there was a file
handle leak somewhere when a connection failed. Anyway we backed off by
putting page view counts in a log file that can be gathered up later. The
good news is that even through all this we never had and corrupted data.