Re: Hardware questions

On Tue, 2005-03-22 at 17:32 -0800, Junaili Lie wrote:
> Here is what we are thinking:
> - Dual Xeon 2.8 Ghz
> - 4GB DDR2 400 Mhz Dual Ranked DIMMS (is dual ranked or single ranked
> makes any differences in terms of performance?). Do you guys think 4GB
> is reasonably enough?
> - 73 GB 15k RPM Ultra 320 SCSI Hard Drive
> - Dual on-board NICS (is this enough, or Gigabit network adapter will help?)

Purely based on price alone, you could get a Sun V20z with similar
config for $400 (list) less... but I don't know what discounts etc you
get.

AMD's processor/memory architecture has a higher throughput, and the
size of the data and speeds you are asking about will need it.

There is still some talk about the context-switching issue with
multi-xeons. I am under the impression that it still gets some people.

You will likely want more disks as well.

Some recent threads on this topic:
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-performance/2005-03/msg00177.php
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-performance/2005-03/msg00238.php
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-performance/2005-03/msg00406.php

HTH,

--
Karim Nassar
Department of Computer Science
Box 15600, College of Engineering and Natural Sciences
Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, Arizona 86011
Office: (928) 523-5868 -=- Mobile: (928) 699-9221