Running large DB's on FreeBSD

[Ronald Klop]

On Tue, 24 Oct 2006 01:01:38 +0200, Mike Jakubik <mikej at rogers.com> wrote:

> Greetings,
>
>     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? :) Secondly, i am just looking for  
> some suggestions, opinions, success/failure story's that may help me  
> out. Is anyone out there using FreeBSD for something of this size? I am  
> hoping that everything will work out well, and the client will be happy.  
> This would generate some good PR for FreeBSD, as it is a very large  
> international company and it would be the first FreeBSD server (that i  
> know of) of this type there.
>
> Thanks, any input will be appreciated.

I'm running MySQL 5 on Linux at my work (4 disk RAID 10/32G  
RAM/4xsingle-core). It has a DB of > 100 GB and much more than millions of  
rows and the preformance is very good with quite a lot of users via the  
webserver. But I do not have any comparisons with Oracle or other systems.  
Unforunately we don't run FreeBSD at work except for my workstation.

The size of the db is not the problem. The load is more important. Are  
there a lot of sequential queries or simultanious? Do you do a lot of  
locking/selects/updates/insert? Are there thousands of tables or just 1?
I do recommend a 64 bit OS if your hardware supports it, because it makes  
allocating memory for MySQL a lot easier.

Ronald.

-- 
  Ronald Klop
  Amsterdam, The Netherlands