Re: How to improve db performance with $7K?

On Mon, 2005-03-28 at 17:36 +0000, Steve Poe wrote:

> I agree with you. Unfortunately, I am not the developer of the
> application. The vendor uses ProIV which connects via ODBC. The vendor
> could certain do some tuning and create more indexes where applicable. I
> am encouraging the vendor to take a more active role and we work
> together on this.

I've done a lot browsing through pg_stat_activity, looking for queries
that either hang around for a while or show up very often, and using
explain to find out if they can use some assistance.

You may also find that a dump and restore with a reconfiguration to
mirrored drives speeds you up a lot - just from the dump and restore.

> With hardware tuning, I am sure we can do better than 35Mb per sec. Also
> moving the top 3 or 5 tables and indexes to their own slice of a RAID10
> and moving pg_xlog to its own drive will help too.

If your database activity involves a lot of random i/o, 35Mb per second
wouldn't be too bad.

While conventional wisdom is that pg_xlog on its own drives (I know you
meant plural :) ) is a big boost, in my particular case I could never
get a a measurable boost that way. Obviously, YMMV.