Re: High CPU Utilization

On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 4:58 PM, Ron <rjpeace(at)earthlink(dot)net> wrote:
> At 02:47 PM 3/24/2009, Joe Uhl wrote:
>
>> Turns out we may have an opportunity to purchase a new database server
>> with this increased load.  Seems that the best route, based on feedback to
>> this thread, is to go whitebox, get quad opterons, and get a very good disk
>> controller.
>>
>> Can anyone recommend a whitebox vendor?
>
> I'll 2nd the Aberdeen recommendation.  I'll add Pogolinux to that list as
> well.
>
>
>> Is there a current controller anyone on this list has experience with that
>> they could recommend?
>
> The 2 best performing RAID controller vendors at this time are AMCC (AKA
> 3Ware) and Areca.
> In general, the 8+ port Areca's with their BB cache maxed outperform every
> other controller available.
>
>
>> This will be a bigger purchase so will be doing research and benchmarking
>> but any general pointers to a vendor/controller greatly appreciated.
>
> Be =very= careful to thoroughly bench both the AMD and Intel CPU options.
>  It is far from clear which is the better purchase.

My anecdotal experience has been that the Opterons stay afloat longer
as load increases, but I haven't had machines with similar enough
hardware to really test that.

> I'd be very interested to see the results of your research and benchmarks
> posted here on pgsql-performance.

Me too. I'm gonna spend some time this summer benchmarking and tuning
the database servers that I pretty much had to burn in and put in
production this year due to time pressures.