Re: scaling up postgres

On 6/13/06, Jim C. Nasby <jnasby(at)pervasive(dot)com> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Jun 13, 2006 at 05:40:58PM -0400, John Vincent wrote:
> > Maybe from a postgresql perspective the cpus may be useless but the
> memory
> > on the pSeries can't be beat. We've been looking at running our
> warehouse
> > (PGSQL) in a LoP lpar but I wasn't able to find a LoP build of 8.1.
>
> Probably just because not many people have access to that kind of
> hardware. Have you tried building on Linux on Power?

Actually it's on my radar. I was looking for a precompiled build first (we
actually checked the Pervasive and Bizgres sites first since we're
considering a support contract) before going the self-compiled route. When I
didn't see a pre-compiled build available, I started looking at the
developer archives and got a little worried that I wouldn't want to base my
job on a self-built Postgres on a fairly new (I'd consider Power 5 fairly
new) platform.

As it stands we're currently migrating to an IBM x445 (8 XPU Xeon, 16GB of
memory) that was our old DB2 production server.

Also, I believe Opterons can do up to 4 DIMMs per memory controller, so
> with 2G sticks an 8 way Opteron could hit 64GB, which isn't exactly
> shabby, and I suspect it'd cost quite a bit less than a comperable
> p570...

This is true. In our case I couldn't get the approval for the new hardware
since we had two x445 boxes sitting there doing nothing (I wanted them for
our VMware environment personally). Another sticking point is finding a
vendor that will provide a hardware support contract similar to what we have
with our existing IBM hardware (24x7x4). Since IBM has f-all for Opteron
based systems and we've sworn off Dell, I was pretty limited. HP was able to
get in on a pilot program and we're considering them now for future hardware
purchases but beyond Dell/IBM/HP, there's not much else that can provide the
kind of hardware support turn-around we need.

> We've been thrilled with the performance of our DB2 systems that run on
> > AIX/Power 5 but since the DB2 instance memory is limited to 18GB, we've
> got
> > two 86GB p570s sitting there being under utilized.
> --
> Jim C. Nasby, Sr. Engineering Consultant jnasby(at)pervasive(dot)com
> Pervasive Software http://pervasive.com work: 512-231-6117
> vcard: http://jim.nasby.net/pervasive.vcf cell: 512-569-9461
>

--
John E. Vincent