FreeBSD hardware solution for a database server

[jmc]

On 8/21/05, Uzi Klein <uzi at bmby.com> wrote:
> 
> jmc wrote:
> > For the best database-write performance on the DL380G4, make sure you
> > have the Battery-Backed Write Cache (BBWC) option.
> 
> Never heard of it. I'd take it as a hardware setup in BIOS?
> (The server is in co-location, i have no physical access to it but i can
> explain ISP sys-admin what to do if needed)

It's an optional hardware module with 128MB of cache that survives
power outages (which is key when using it as a write cache).  However,
if you have the DL380G4 with the SAS P600 controller, it already has
256MB of BBWC built in.

> > The more spindles you have, the better.  Are you using all 6 drive
> > bays in the 380?  Make sure they're all Ultra320 drives.  15K will
> > give the best performance, but the 10K drives aren't too shabby.
> > RAID0 will give the best performance, but it's not redundant.  Next is
> > RAID1, then RAID5 or ADG.
> 
> I have 5 drives 36 GB Ultra320 15K:
> 
> 2 mirrored drives mounted as /
> 3 RAID 5 drives mounted as /var
> 
> www# df -h
> Filesystem     Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
> /dev/da0s1a     33G    4.7G     26G    16%    /
> devfs          1.0K    1.0K      0B   100%    /dev
> /dev/da1s1d     62G    9.5G     47G    17%    /var
> 
> > You might also try a DL385 (dual socket Opteron) or DL585 (quad socket
> > Opteron) which will give you either 4 or 8 procs (if they are dual
> > core).
> 
> Are you suggesting AMD based boxes outperforms Intel based machines?
> That's what I'm really interested in...

I can't really say that.  It all depends on the application.  If
FreeBSD had NUMA support, then the Opteron's architecture would have a
big advantage for memory-intensive applications.