From owner-freebsd-database@FreeBSD.ORG Sat Jul 19 15:13:15 2003 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-database@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 699A337B401; Sat, 19 Jul 2003 15:13:15 -0700 (PDT) Received: from remt25.cluster1.charter.net (remt25.cluster1.charter.net [209.225.8.35]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 9C2E643F93; Sat, 19 Jul 2003 15:13:14 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from paul@pathiakis.com) Received: from [66.189.13.10] (HELO pc2.pathiakis.com) by remt25.cluster1.charter.net (CommuniGate Pro SMTP 4.0.6) with ESMTP id 97167237; Sat, 19 Jul 2003 18:13:13 -0400 From: Paul Pathiakis To: freebsd-performance@freebsd.org, freebsd-database@freebsd.org Date: Sat, 19 Jul 2003 18:18:13 -0400 User-Agent: KMail/1.5.2 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline Message-Id: <200307191818.13516.paul@pathiakis.com> Subject: Tuning for PostGreSQL Database X-BeenThere: freebsd-database@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: Database use and development under FreeBSD List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Sat, 19 Jul 2003 22:13:15 -0000 Hi, I'm trying to setup a dedicated PostGreSQL Database server. First off, don't get me going on the inadequacies of the hardware setup, I am a sysadmin with a partial clue. :-) (The hardware was bought without any input from me for demo purposes.) It's an Intel board with twin 2.8 GHZ processors and Promise ATA Fastrack RAID built-in, 1 GB of RAM. Since this is just a throughput/response test against SuSe Linux Enterprise Server, Windows XP and FreeBSD, I'm going to break the mirror and try to do some intelligence about at least trying to log to a different drive. Anyhow, there are 2-3 drives in this box, no scsi, nothing. I want it to perform like no tomorrow on FreeBSD, not being a DB admin, I'm going to try to cover all the bases on this, so please let me know if I've missed something: First, this is a demo, I'm not worried about redundancy at this point. FreeBSD 4.8 or 5.1? OS configuration, any suggestions on SWAP layout, how much swap, both drives? Are there optimal parameters for sizing on the disk throughput? That is, newfs parameters, i-node configuration, tunefs parameters, async on the drives, etc? (consider nothing trivial, please feel free to just lay into this like I'm a newbie - considering my not-so-extensive experience with PostgreSQL) Should I keep softupdates on or off? This is a db and I am constrained by data integrity issues, however, I'm looking for as much speed as possible given the limited setup. what is the best layout of OS, PostgreSQL, and PostgreSQL logging on a 2 disk configuration? 3 disk configuration? Is there anything that I should put in the following files for tuning: systrcl.conf (semaphore and shared memory configurations, etc?) loader.conf (hw.ata.atapi_dma on or off? how do I make the hardware scream as fast as possible at tuning level and then with considerations to running PostgreSQL? Give as much too me as you can. I'm the sysadmin and I love how easily supportable FreeBSD is with regards to software, package, OS, maintenance. People are vying for XP and Suse. However, I'll end up supporting this and I know how easy FreeBSD is to support. If there's additional reading, let me know. I'm more than happy to follow links, read more about PostgreSQL, etc. Thank you all! Paul Pathiakis