> First off RAM helps a LOT. 192MB RAM is not much. Look at "top"
>and keep adding it until the cache and buffer sizes are quite large.
>I would think 512MB or 1GB of RAM is what you need. The idea is
>to let the OS (Linux) cache a good partion of your database in
>RAM. Postgres has a buffer pool which you should set to some
>huge size but OS level caching really helps speed things up.
>My rule is to keep adding RAM until some of it is not used.
The speed of your disks makes a difference also. No matter how much
cache you have you are still going to hit your disks. I would say that
LVD SCSI is a minimum.
At the risk of starting a religious war I found that Postgresql-6.4.?
on FreeBSD 3.0 would create a table more than twice as fast, wall clock
time, as the same postgres same table on RedHat 5.2. The bigger the
table the bigger the difference. The machine, a pc, was sitting on my
desk so I could see and hear it. FreeBSD appeared to be capable of MANY
more disk accesses per unit of time than RedHat. Important for table
creation yes, for table access perhaps. Your mileage may vary. BTW
other than recompiling the BSD kernel to reflect only the hardware
installed I made no attempt to optimize either system. BTW II The
same hardware (machine) was used with both OS's.
hal
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