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From: Joshua D. Drake <jd@commandprompt.com>
To: Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us>
Cc: Ben Chobot <bench@silentmedia.com>
Cc: Steve Crawford <scrawford@pinpointresearch.com>
Cc: pgsql-performance@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: BBU Cache vs. spindles
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2010 19:25:19 -0700
Message-ID: <1287627919.7085.89.camel@jd-desktop> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <201010210213.o9L2Du210280@momjian.us>
References: <201010210213.o9L2Du210280@momjian.us>

On Wed, 2010-10-20 at 22:13 -0400, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> Ben Chobot wrote:
> > On Oct 7, 2010, at 4:38 PM, Steve Crawford wrote:
> > 
> > > I'm weighing options for a new server. In addition to PostgreSQL, this machine will handle some modest Samba and Rsync load.
> > >
> > > I will have enough RAM so the virtually all disk-read activity will be cached. The average PostgreSQL read activity will be modest - a mix of single-record and fairly large (reporting) result-sets. Writes will be modest as well but will come in brief (1-5 second) bursts of individual inserts. The rate of insert requests will hit 100-200/second for those brief bursts.
> > >
> > > So...
> > >
> > > Am I likely to be better off putting $$$ toward battery-backup on the RAID or toward adding a second RAID-set and splitting off the WAL traffic? Or something else?
> > 
> > A BBU is, what, $100 or so? Adding one seems a no-brainer to me.
> > Dedicated WAL spindles are nice and all, but they're still spinning
> > media. Raid card cache is waaaay faster, and while it's best at bursty
> > writes, it sounds like bursty writes are precisely what you have.
> 
> Totally agree!

BBU first, more spindles second.

> 
> --
>   Bruce Momjian  <bruce@momjian.us>        http://momjian.us
>   EnterpriseDB                             http://enterprisedb.com
> 
>   + It's impossible for everything to be true. +
> 

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