On Wed, Jun 09, 2004 at 01:45:49PM +0100, Marvin Wright wrote: > Hi, > > We are about to build some new database servers and I have some questions > which I'd like some advice on. > > The machines we are building have 4 Xeon 2GHz CPU's, 4 x 32GB SCSI disk > using RAID 1+0 (so thats 64GB of storage) and 4 Gig of RAM.
Consider RAID10: http://www.acnc.com/04_01_10.html As opposed to 0+1: http://www.acnc.com/04_01_0_1.html You'd think they're the same but they're subtly different leading to very different characteristics. Note the Recommended Application for 10 is a database server. > Which file system would you recommend for this ? I've seen many > recommendations for ReiserFS but have no experience of it. I use xfs on my Debian MySQL server. Specs are pretty similar, two 2.8GHz Xeons, 4 36GB U320 drives (in RAID10, which is superb), and 4GB of memory. My /db has 418 inodes used, and 16G used out of the 30G on it; making for quite a large average filesize. To be honest, the filesystem isn't really my bottleneck - with 4GB, MySQL and the OS have tons of caching room, and the filesystem is doing maybe 40k/s of sustained activity with the odd burst of real work. You'll probably like to at least check xfs out. > Should I use a pre-compiled binary or should I compile one myself ? I found it makes so little difference it's not worth worrying about. I use the apt package for ease of upgrade and dependencies. > Should the 2 disks for storage be split up into partitions or just 1 large > partition per disk ? Always partition. You get to choose which filesystem suits each partition best. My preference; ext3 for /, xfs for /db, ext2 for /dump. / does very little work but I want it consistant so ext3 is fine. /dump stores backups (which are mirrored elsewhere) and I don't care if its trashed, but I want it fast when I am using it. > Is there anything else I should consider when configuring the machines that > affect the performance ? Linux 2.6 probably isn't in RedHat 7.3 base, but you'll want to try it. It's faster than 2.4. My configuration was quite happy doing 35,000 selects per second (with super-smack, an arbitrary benchmarking tool); with 2.4 it was a few thousand lower. -- Chris -- MySQL General Mailing List For list archives: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql To unsubscribe: http://lists.mysql.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
