Re: Need help with 8.4 Performance Testing

Matthew Wakeling <matthew(at)flymine(dot)org> writes:

> On Tue, 9 Dec 2008, Scott Marlowe wrote:
>> I wonder how many hard drives it would take to be CPU bound on random
>> access patterns? About 40 to 60? And probably 15k / SAS drives to
>> boot. Cause that's what we're looking at in the next few years where
>> I work.
>
> There's a problem with that thinking. That is, in order to exercise many
> spindles, you will need to have just as many (if not more) concurrent requests.
> And if you have many concurrent requests, then you can spread them over
> multiple CPUs. So it's more a case of "How many hard drives PER CPU". It also
> becomes a matter of whether Postgres can scale that well.

Well:

$ units
2445 units, 71 prefixes, 33 nonlinear units
You have: 8192 byte/5ms
You want: MB/s
* 1.6384
/ 0.61035156

At 1.6MB/s per drive if find Postgres is cpu-bound doing sequential scans at
1GB/s you'll need about 640 drives to keep one cpu satisfied doing random I/O
-- assuming you have perfect read-ahead and the read-ahead itself doesn't add
cpu overhead. Both of which are false of course, but at least in theory that's
what it'll take.

--
Gregory Stark
EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com
Ask me about EnterpriseDB's On-Demand Production Tuning