Dear PostGIS users,

I am currently planning to set up a PostGIS instance for my lab. Turns out I believe this would be useful for the whole center, so that I'm now considering setting up a PostGIS server for everyone—if interest is shared of course. At the moment, I am however struggling with what would be required in terms of hardware, and of course, the cost will depend on that—at the end of the day, it's really a matter of money well spent. I have then a series of questions/remarks, and I would welcome any feedback from people with existing experience on setting up a multi-user PostGIS server.

* My own experience is rather limited: I used PostGIS quite a bit, but only on a desktop, with 2 users. The desktop was quite good (quad-core Xeon, 12 Go RAM, 500 GB hd), running Debian, and we never had any performance issue (although some queries were rather long, but still acceptable).

* The use case I'm envisioning would be (at least in the foreseeable future):
- About 10 faculty users (which means potentially a little bit more students using it); I would have hard time considering more than 4 concurrent users; - Data would primarily involve a lot (hundreds/thousands) of high resolution (spatial and temporal) raster and vector maps, possibly over large areas (Florida / USA / continental), as well as potentially millions of GPS records (animals individually monitored); - Queries will primarily involve retrieving points/maps over given areas/time, as well as intersecting points over environmental layers; other use cases will involve working with steps, i.e. the straight line segment connecting two successive locations, and intersecting them with environmental layers;

* I couldn't find comprehensive or detailed guidelines on-line about hardware, but from what I could see, it seems that memory wouldn't be the main issue, but the number of cores would be (one core per database connection if I'm not mistaken). At the same time, we want to make sure that the experience is smooth for everyone...

* Is there a difference in terms of performance and usability between a Linux-based and a MS-based server? My center is unfortunately MS-centered, and existing equipment runs with MS systems... It would thus be easier for them to set up a MS-based server.

* Does anyone have worked with a server running the DB engine, while the DB itself was stored on another box/server? That would likely be the case here since we already have a dedicated box for file storage. Along these lines, does the system of the file storage box matter (Linux vs. MS)?

* We may also use the server as a workstation to streamline PostGIS processing with further R analyses/modeling (or even use R from within the database using PL/R). Again, does anyone have experience doing it? Is a single workstation the recommended way to work with such workflow? Or would it be better (but more costly) to have one server dedicated to PostGIS and another one, with different specs, dedicated to analyses (R)?

I realize my questions and comments may be a confusing, likely because of the lack of experience about these issues on my side. I really welcome any feedback of people working with PostGIS servers in a small unit, or any similar setting that could be informative!

In advance, thank you very much!

Sincerely,
Mathieu Basille.


--

~$ whoami
Mathieu Basille
http://ase-research.org/basille

~$ locate --details
University of Florida \\
Fort Lauderdale Research and Education Center
(+1) 954-577-6314

~$ fortune
« Le tout est de tout dire, et je manque de mots
Et je manque de temps, et je manque d'audace. »
 -- Paul Éluard

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