On Thursday, January 24, 2013 06:43:41 PM rich carroll wrote: > We are discussing upgrading our current email server hard drives or > outsourcing email to google or some other provider. The question to me is, > can we get 8 x 3TB sata drives and go raid6 and allow up to 5GB of mail > storage for each mailbox? Will this cause the server(db) to puke? Anyone > have experience with this range of server and will postgres struggle with a > DB that size? Any idea what is too big for one box? > > Currently the server seems to handle the load OK, but the db can get slow > at times before db upkeep and I attribute this to disk IO but am not sure. > CPU usage is never very much. Any pointers to find my bottleneck when it > does have issues would be appreciated. Would the raid improve the read > performance of the drive enough(or at all) to overcome the increased db > size?
Do not use RAID 5 or 6 for a database server. Just don't. RAID 10 is the only choice. vmstat when it's slow will show you what the bottleneck is. If I/O wait is significant, then the disk is the bottleneck. PostgreSQL can handle very large databases. But I/O needs to be distributed over a lot of disks to get concurrency up. If you only have a single raid 1 disk pair now, that is certainly your bottleneck. More RAM for caching is also always good. Serving as many random reads as possible from cache is essential. _______________________________________________ DBmail mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.fastxs.nl/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dbmail
