On 1/27/11 4:11 PM, "Alan Hodgson" 
<ahodg...@simkin.ca<mailto:ahodg...@simkin.ca>> wrote:


On January 27, 2011, Robert Schnabel 
<schnab...@missouri.edu<mailto:schnab...@missouri.edu>> wrote:

> So my questions are 1) am I'm crazy for doing this, 2) would you change

> anything and 3) is it acceptable to put the xlog & wal (and perhaps tmp

> filespace) on a different controller than everything else? Please keep

> in mind I'm a geneticist who happens to know a little bit about

> bioinformatics and not the reverse. :-)

>

Putting the WAL on a second controller does help, if you're write-heavy.

I tried separating indexes and data once on one server and didn't really notice 
that it helped much. Managing the space was problematic. I would suggest 
putting those together on a single RAID-10 of all the 300GB drives (minus a 
spare). It will probably outperform separate arrays most of the time, and be 
much easier to manage.

If you go this route, I suggest two equally sized RAID 10's on different 
controllers fir index + data, with software raid-0 on top of that.  RAID 10 
will max out a controller after 6 to 10 drives, usually.  Using the OS RAID 0 
to aggregate the throughput of two controllers works great.

WAL only has to be a little bit faster than your network in most cases.  I've 
never seen it be a bottleneck on large bulk loads if it is on its own 
controller with 120MB/sec write throughput.  I suppose a bulk load from COPY 
might stress it a bit more, but CPU ends up the bottleneck in postgres once you 
have I/O hardware this capable.



--

A hybrid Escalade is missing the point much in the same way that having a diet 
soda with your extra large pepperoni pizza is missing the point.

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