Re: performance on new linux box

On Thu, Jul 8, 2010 at 9:53 AM, Kevin Grittner
<Kevin(dot)Grittner(at)wicourts(dot)gov>wrote:

> Eliot Gable <egable+pgsql-performance(at)gmail(dot)com<egable%2Bpgsql-performance(at)gmail(dot)com>>
> wrote:
>
> > For about $2k - $3k, you can get a server that will do upwards of
> > 300 MB/sec, assuming the bulk of that cost goes to a good
> > hardware-based RAID controller with a battery backed-up cache and
> > some good 15k RPM SAS drives.
>
> FWIW, I concur that the description so far suggests that this server
> either doesn't have a good RAID controller card with battery backed-
> up (BBU) cache, or that it isn't configured properly.
>
>
On another note, it is also entirely possible that just re-writing your
queries will completely solve your problem and make your performance
bottleneck go away. Sometimes throwing hardware at a problem is not the best
(or cheapest) solution. Personally, I would never throw hardware at a
problem until I am certain that I have everything else optimized as much as
possible. One of the stored procedures I recently wrote in pl/pgsql was
originally chewing up my entire development box's processing capabilities at
just 20 transactions per second. It's a pretty wimpy box, so I was not
really expecting a lot out of it. However, after spending several weeks
optimizing my queries, I now have it doing twice as much work at 120
transactions per second on the same box. So, if I had thrown hardware at the
problem, I would have spent 12 times more on hardware than I need to spend
now for the same level of performance.

If you can post some of your queries, there are a lot of bright people on
this discussion list that can probably help you solve your bottleneck
without spending a ton of money on new hardware. Obviously, there is no
guarantee -- you might already be as optimized as you can get in your
queries, but I doubt it. Even after spending months tweaking my queries, I
am still finding things here and there where I can get a bit more
performance out of them.

--
Eliot Gable