Running large DB's on FreeBSD

[Chuck Swiger]

On Oct 23, 2006, at 4:01 PM, Mike Jakubik wrote:
>  I am in the process of implementing a fairly large mysql server  
> for an even larger company, and naturally i want to use FreeBSD.  
> The hardware will be an HP DL385, 2 x dual-core Opterons, 16GB  
> RAM,  7 x 15k rpm disks in a RAID5 setup. I'm not exactly informed  
> as to the specific workload yet, however i know the database will  
> have several million rows and be larger than 10GB.
>
>    So, first of all, am i crazy for choosing fbsd+mysql for this  
> rather than something like Solaris + Oracle? :)

Moderately...it kinda depends on the budget available.  I regard  
Solaris + Oracle as one of the most reliable combinations for  
moderate to extreme load, for a system that might well be in  
operation for five to ten years.  If I was going to do FreeBSD, I  
might look into Postgres instead of MySQL; well, I might look into  
something else than MySQL under many circumstances.  I've gotten some  
pretty good use out of OpenBase, for another choice.

As for the disk configuration, using RAID-5 is one of the worst  
possible choices for a database; using multiple RAID-1 mirrors or a  
RAID-10 config would probably do a lot better in terms of performance  
and reliability.

-- 
-Chuck