Re: Setup for large database

On Apr 20, 2006, at 9:02 PM, mlartz(at)gmail(dot)com wrote:

> 1) How anal should I be about my hardware setup? I have about 15
> 300GB
> 10K RPM SCSI drives, 4 of which I can directly attach to the server
> and
> the rest one the FC array. Should I just put the OS and transaction
> logs on the direct attached storage and and then RAID10 the rest of
> them and be done, or would I significantly benefit from separating out
> the indexes and partitioning across tablespaces across drives? Would
> RAID5 across 10+ drives yield acceptable performance numbers?

If you have that many drives, make one RAID1 pair for the OS and a
dedicated RAID1 pair for the pg_xlog. I'd put the rest into a RAID10
if you're not willing to do experimentation first... If I had the
time I'd put a RAID5 on it and simulate the expected load on it, then
compare the RAID10 under same load.

It depends a lot on your RAID controller, how much cache (battery
backed!!!) it has, and your usage patterns.

The pgsql-performance list may have more helpful responses.

As for partitioning based on octet, you should look at your
distribution of addresses and decide if it scatters the data evenly
enough for you.