Re: Tuning PostgreSQL

On 29 Jul 2003, Ron Johnson wrote:

> On Tue, 2003-07-29 at 11:18, scott.marlowe wrote:
> > On 29 Jul 2003, Ron Johnson wrote:
> >
> > > On Tue, 2003-07-29 at 10:14, Vivek Khera wrote:
> > > > >>>>> "GS" == Greg Stark <gsstark(at)mit(dot)edu> writes:
> > > >
> > > > GS> "scott.marlowe" <scott(dot)marlowe(at)ihs(dot)com> writes:
> > > >
> > > > GS> But you have to actually test your setup in practice to see if it
> > > > GS> hurts. A big data warehousing system will be faster under RAID5
> > > > GS> than under RAID1+0 because of the extra disks in the
> > > > GS> stripeset. The more disks in the stripeset the more bandwidth you
> > > > GS> get.
> > > >
> > > > Anyone have ideas on 14 spindles? I just ordered a disk subsystem
> > > > with 14 high speed (U320 15kRPM) SCSI disks to hook up with a dell
> > > > PERC3/DC controller (only 128MB cache, though).
> > >
> > > 14 drives on one SCSI card, eh? I'd be worried about saturating
> > > the bus.
> >
> > I'm pretty sure those PERCs are based on the megaraid cards, which can
> > handle 3 or 4 channels each...
>
> Each with 14 devices? If so, isn't that a concentrated point of
> failure, even if the channels are 1/2 full?

Yep. I've built one once before when BIG hard drives were 9 gigs. :-)

And it is a point of concentrated failure, which brings me to my favorite
part about the LSI megaraid cards (which most / all perc3s are
apparently.)

If you build a RAID1+0 or 0+1, you can seperate it out so each sub part is
on it's own card, and the other cards keep acting like one big card.
Assuming the bad card isn't killing your PCI bus or draining the 12V rail
or something.

> > > Maybe it's an old rule of thumb, but I would fill a SCSI chain
> > > more than half full.
> >
> > It's an old rule of thumb, but it still applies, it just takes more drives
> > to saturate the channel. Figure ~ 30 to 50 MBytes a second per drive, on
> > a U320 port it would take 10 drives to saturate it, and considering random
> > accesses will be much slower than the max ~30 megs a second off the
> > platter rate, it might take more than the max 14 drives to saturate U320.
>
> Ok. You'd still saturate the 133MB/s PCI bus at 133/30 = 4.4 drives.

But that's seq scan. For many database applications, random access
performance is much more important. Imagine 200 people entering
reservations of 8k or less each into a transaction processing engine.
Each transactions chance to hit an unoccupied spindle is what really
counts. If there's 30 spindles, each doing a stripe's worth of access all
the time, it's likely to never flood the channel.

If random access is 1/4th the speed of seq scan, then you need to multiply
it by 4 to get the number of drives that'd saturate the PCI bus.