Running FreeBSD/PostgreSQL on high-end dual Xeon box

[Charles Swiger]

On Jun 3, 2004, at 5:42 PM, Kenji M wrote:
> I am currently specing a 2U dual Xeon server and hope to use
> RAID 0+1 capability.  The question is for PostgreSQL admins...
>
> 1) Which RAID controller should we use?

You haven't mentioned whether you plan to use SCSI or IDE drives.  The 
PERC RAID controller in Dell's PowerEdge's works quite well for the 
former, but you might consider the 3ware twe if you're doing IDE.

> 2) Considering Q1, does it not even make sense to use 
> FreeBSD+PostgreSQL
> and bite the bullet and go with Linux (assuming it has better hw RAID
> support) and run PostgreSQL on that using a fancier journaling 
> filesystem.

Hmm.  What makes you think that a journalling filesystem gains you much 
when you are running a database?

Databases do their own transaction management using two-phase commit 
and logfiles for rollback in case of a crash using a few very large 
files, which they'll write to directly using async/directIO (whatever 
the term you wish to use is), rather than using OS/filesystem 
buffering....

-- 
-Chuck