Running FreeBSD/PostgreSQL on high-end dual Xeon box

[Kenji M]

Thanks guys!
After doing some additional reading and your comments I think
staying with FreeBSD coupled with a good RAID controller would
probably be the least hassle, reliable, and good performing 
setup.

I am looking at a dual Xeon box using an Adpatec 2200S RAID
controller with the write buffer backup battery module.
We will also probably install 4GB of ram.

Now the new question is which RAID level would provide the best
balance of performance and reliability... I currently have a
similar setup that has RAID 0+1 with one hot spare ready in case
of mirror disk failure.

I had been considering the same setup, but it might make sense just
to use 3 disk RAID5 with hot spare ready.  The new RAID controller
implementation might not buy us much by using 0+1 vs. 5.

Any thoughts?

-Kenji

On Thu, Jun 03, 2004 at 06:40:07PM -0400, Charles Swiger wrote:
> 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

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kenji morishige
kenji at kenjim.com
http://www.kenjim.com
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