Re: Scaling further up

On Tue, 2004-03-02 at 17:42, William Yu wrote:
> Anjan Dave wrote:
> > We have a Quad-Intel XEON 2.0GHz (1MB cache), 12GB memory, running RH9,
> > PG 7.4.0. There's an internal U320, 10K RPM RAID-10 setup on 4 drives.
> >
> > We are expecting a pretty high load, a few thousands of 'concurrent'
> > users executing either select, insert, update, statments.
>
> The quick and dirty method would be to upgrade to the recently announced
> 3GHz Xeon MPs with 4MB of L3. My semi-educated guess is that you'd get
> another +60% there due to the huge L3 hiding the Xeon's shared bus penalty.

If you are going to have thousands of 'concurrent' users you should
seriously consider the 2.6 kernel if you are running Linux or as an
alternative going with FreeBSD. You will need to load test your system
and become an expert on tuning Postgres to get the absolute maximum
performance from each and every query you have.

And you will need lots of hard drives. By lots I mean dozen(s) in a
raid 10 array with a good controller. Thousands of concurrent users
means hundreds or thousands of transactions per second. I've personally
seen it scale that far but in my opinion you will need a lot more hard
drives and ram than cpu.