Date: Sat, 18 Mar 2006 13:00:37 +1300
From: Mark Kirkwood <markir@paradise.net.nz>
Subject: Re: Best OS & Configuration for Dual Xeon w/4GB &
In-reply-to: <1142636433.1141.33.camel@state.g2switchworks.com>
To: Scott Marlowe <smarlowe@g2switchworks.com>
Cc: Kenji Morishige <kenjim@juniper.net>, pgsql-performance@postgresql.org
Message-id: <441B4DA5.1020002@paradise.net.nz>
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	<1142636433.1141.33.camel@state.g2switchworks.com>

Scott Marlowe wrote:
> On Fri, 2006-03-17 at 16:11, Kenji Morishige wrote:
> 
>>About a year ago we decided to migrate our central database that powers various
>>intranet tools from MySQL to PostgreSQL. We have about 130 tables and about
>>10GB of data that stores various status information for a variety of services
>>for our intranet.  We generally have somewhere between 150-200 connections to
>>the database at any given time and probably anywhere between 5-10 new 
>>connections being made every second and about 100 queries per second. Most
>>of the queries and transactions are very small due to the fact that the tools
>>were designed to work around the small functionality of MySQL 3.23 DB.  
>>Our company primarily uses FreeBSD and we are stuck on FreeBSD 4.X series due
>>to IT support issues,
> 
> 
> There were a LOT of performance enhancements to FreeBSD with the 5.x
> series release.  I'd recommend fast tracking the database server to the
> 5.x branch.  4-stable was release 6 years ago.  5-stable was released
> two years ago.
> 
> 

I would recommend skipping 5.x and using 6.0 - as it performs measurably 
better than 5.x. In particular the vfs layer is no longer under the 
GIANT lock, so you will get considerably improved concurrent filesystem 
access on your dual Xeon.

Regards

Mark