Re: New boxes available for QA

On Wed, Apr 2, 2008 at 1:53 AM, Greg Smith <gsmith(at)gregsmith(dot)com> wrote:
> The pgbench-tools utilities I was working on at one point anticipated this
> sort of test starting one day. You can't really get useful results out of
> pgbench without running it enough times that you get average or median
> values. I dump everything into a results database which can be separated
> from the databases used for running the test, and then it's easy to
> compare day to day aggregate results across different query types.

I already used your pgbench tools but I just used the ability to draw
graphs with gnuplot, I didn't test the database thing.

> I haven't had a reason to work on that recently, but if you've got a
> semi-public box ready for benchmarks now I do. Won't be able to run any
> serious benchmarks on the systems you described, but should be great for
> detecting basic regressions and testing less popular compile-time options
> as you describe.

Yeah, that's exactly what they are for.

> As far as the other more powerful machines you mentioned go, would need to
> know a bit more about the disks and disk controller in there to comment
> about whether those are worth the trouble to integrate. The big missing
> piece of community hardware that remains elusive would be a system with
> >=4 cores, >=8GB RAM, and >=8 disks with a usable write-caching controller
> in it.

All the other boxes are Dell boxes (1750/1850/2950/6850) with PERC 4
or 5 depending on the servers. Two of them have external attachments
to a disk array but it's an old one with 2 separated arrays (4 disks +
5 disks IIRC).
They aren't big beasts but I think they can be useful to hackers who
don't have any hardware fully available and also run more serious
continuous tests than the other ones.

I'll post the specs of the servers that may be fully available for
community purposes tomorrow.

--
Guillaume