> > > I expect my site to sustain something around 1000-3000 new user > > > acquisitions per day, all of which will account for an insert > into 3 > > > GIST indices.
Most people when they talk about a large load on a DBMS system talk about "transactins per second". As in "100 per second" Even if we only assume 12 hour days, 3000 per day is only one transaction every 14 seconds. That's a triveal rate that could be handled on an older Pentium II PC. Assume the system runs for five years at 3000/day. That's only only about 500,000 rows. In database terms that's not much. Don't worry you have a problem well within the limits of a small PC runnig PostgreSQL. You want to of course place the intire process of adding a new user inside a begin/commit transaction. This will provide the type of "queue" you want. All of the inserts will get done when the "commit" happens. Also you will likely want to run the user interface in its own process or thread. Those two things will be all you need as long as your average transaction rate remains so low. If there are ANY locks done in your code you need to remove them and re-think the design. Everyone always thinks they have a "large" database project. Even a 200,000 row table is small enough that it and its index files can be cached in RAM. Where you might run into the kinds of problems you are thinking about is if you had automated sensor systems (looking either down at the Earth or up at the sky) and software to automatically extract features and catlog those in to a DBMS. Then if you have several of those sensors running you get to the high rates that drive concurrentcy issues. But if you only have four or five users each doing a transaction per second it's not an issue. After you get past the 100 transacton per second rates you are looking at Ocacle on Sun hardware and terrabyte sized disk arrays Like we have down in the lab here. BUt belleive my you need automated data collection systems to gemerate enough data to get you into trouble But I run low-end stuff on my very old 500Mhz PIII ===== Chris Albertson Home: 310-376-1029 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cell: 310-990-7550 Office: 310-336-5189 [EMAIL PROTECTED] KG6OMK __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Check out the new Yahoo! Front Page. www.yahoo.com ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 3: if posting/reading through Usenet, please send an appropriate subscribe-nomail command to [EMAIL PROTECTED] so that your message can get through to the mailing list cleanly