From: Scott Carey <scott@richrelevance.com>
To: Scott Marlowe <scott.marlowe@gmail.com>
To: Ron <rjpeace@earthlink.net>
Cc: Joe Uhl <joeuhl@gmail.com>
Cc: pgsql-performance@postgresql.org <pgsql-performance@postgresql.org>
Subject: Re: High CPU Utilization
Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2009 17:22:24 -0700
Message-ID: <C5EEC750.3B27%scott@richrelevance.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <dcc563d10903241616l2c16e803q7f327e4d7aaf5c43@mail.gmail.com>
On 3/24/09 4:16 PM, "Scott Marlowe" <scott.marlowe@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 4:58 PM, Ron <rjpeace@earthlink.net> wrote:
>> At 02:47 PM 3/24/2009, Joe Uhl wrote:
>>
>>> Turns out we may have an opportunity to purchase a new database server
>>> with this increased load. Seems that the best route, based on feedback to
>>> this thread, is to go whitebox, get quad opterons, and get a very good disk
>>> controller.
>>>
>>> Can anyone recommend a whitebox vendor?
>>
>> I'll 2nd the Aberdeen recommendation. I'll add Pogolinux to that list as
>> well.
>>
>>
>>> Is there a current controller anyone on this list has experience with that
>>> they could recommend?
>>
>> The 2 best performing RAID controller vendors at this time are AMCC (AKA
>> 3Ware) and Areca.
>> In general, the 8+ port Areca's with their BB cache maxed outperform every
>> other controller available.
I personally have had rather bad performance experiences with 3Ware
9550/9650 SATA cards. I have no experience with the AMCC SAS stuff though.
Adaptec demolished the 9650 on arrays larger than 4 drives, and Areca will
do better at the very high end.
However, if CPU is the issue for this particular case, then the RAID
controller details are less significant.
I don't know how much data you have, but don't forget the option of SSDs, or
a mix of hard drives and SSDs for different data. Ideally, you would want
the OS to just extend its pagecache onto a SSD, but only OpenSolaris can do
that right now and it is rather new (needs to be persistent across reboots).
http://blogs.sun.com/brendan/entry/testhttp://blogs.sun.com/brendan/entry/l2arc_screenshots>>
>>
>>> This will be a bigger purchase so will be doing research and benchmarking
>>> but any general pointers to a vendor/controller greatly appreciated.
>>
>> Be =very= careful to thoroughly bench both the AMD and Intel CPU options.
>> It is far from clear which is the better purchase.
>
> My anecdotal experience has been that the Opterons stay afloat longer
> as load increases, but I haven't had machines with similar enough
> hardware to really test that.
>
One may want to note that Intel's next generation servers are due out within
45 days from what I can sense ('Q2' traditionally means ~April 1 for Intel
when on time). These should be a rather significant bump for a database as
they adopt the AMD / Alpha style memory-controller-on-CPU architecture and
add a lot of cache. Other relevant improvements: increased performance on
compare-and-swap operations, the return of hyper threading, and ridiculous
memory bandwidth per CPU (3 DDR3 memory channels per CPU).
>> I'd be very interested to see the results of your research and benchmarks
>> posted here on pgsql-performance.
>
> Me too. I'm gonna spend some time this summer benchmarking and tuning
> the database servers that I pretty much had to burn in and put in
> production this year due to time pressures.
>
> --
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To: pgsql-performance@postgresql.org
Cc: scott@richrelevance.com, scott.marlowe@gmail.com, rjpeace@earthlink.net, joeuhl@gmail.com
Subject: Re: High CPU Utilization
In-Reply-To: <C5EEC750.3B27%scott@richrelevance.com>
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