[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
There are good white papers about DB IO performance, e.g from Microsoft. They are not read very often...James Robinson wrote:
Users are primarily, if not stupid, ignorant. They will read theYes, that is generally the case (prefer pg_xlog on separate spindle),
absolute
minimum needed to achieve a goal and little else. I say this with the
utmost respect, because I and probably everyone else on this group is
guilty of the same thing. So, the "preferred" installation procedure,
i.e.
the one with the easy to follow directions, should showcase features
the
user should know, and leave the user in a good place. IMHO, the user's
database on one volume and pg_xlog on another is a better starting
place.
but no
need to *forcibly* overcomplicate things if the box has only one
spindle,
or if they have only one single RAID'd partition configured. We should
continue to err on the side of keeping the path to a functional system
nice and simple, yet still offering superb functionality. Oracle gets
this
wrong. pg_autovacuum is another good step in this direction.
In the age of inexpensive RAID, tablespaces have more or less lost their relevance regarding performance. pgsql's philosophy respects this by leaving the storage work up to the OS and disk subsystem. Even having the xlog on a different spindle won't help too much; you'll probably be better off if you stuff all your spindles in one raid on most systems. For worse, splitting two disks into separate storage areas to have xlog separated would degrade safety for very little performance gain. So the advise is: one disk, no alternative. 2 to 20 disks: use a single raid. more disks: examine your access patterns carefully before you believe you can do the job better than your raid controller.
This leaves table spaces as a mere administrative feature, many (most) installations will happily live without that.
Regards,
Andreas
I would say that this is almost completely misinformed. Depending on the OS and the hardware, of course, a write on one spindle may not affect the performance of another.
There are so many great things that happen when you have separate spindles. The OS manages the file systems separately, the device drivers may be separate, and if the low-level I/O device driver is even different, then you get your own bus mastering I/O buffers. All around good things happen when you have separate spindles.
A single postgresql process may not see much benefit, because it does not do background I/O, but multiple postgresql processes will perform better because multiple I/O requests can be issued and processed simultaneously. If you got good SMP in your kernel, even better.
If you dedicate drives to services, it's your responsibility to size everything to have a balanced load. You'll probably end with some drives being the bottleneck, while others are still almost idle. That's why RAID shoud be used in the first and second place, it will distribute the workload on all spindles equally until saturated. The recommendation to use separate disks for this and that originates from ancient days where performance had to be achieved by application level programming and configuration, implementing own file systems on raw devices. pgsql deliberately doesn't work like this.
If you may use lets say 10 disks, you'd probably something similar like 2x RAID1 for / 2x RAID1 for /tmp + swap 2x RAID1 for xlog 4x RAID5 for data
I bet you get better performance with all disks in one RAID5, because now the system disks not only have no negative impact on DB transfer performance, but add additional seek bandwidth to DB traffic.
Regards, Andreas
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