[PERFORM] IDE/SCSI disk tools to turn off write caching

2004-01-15 Thread Syd
We've found these tools
http://scsirastools.sourceforge.net/ and
http://www.seagate.com/support/seatools/ (for seagate drives)
to check the settings of scsi disks and to change settings for seagate 
drives.

What are people using for IDE disks?
Are you all using hdparm on linux
http://freshmeat.net/projects/hdparm/?topic_id=146%2C861
or are there other tools?

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Re: [PERFORM] insert speed - Mac OSX vs Redhat

2004-01-15 Thread Syd
On 16/01/2004, at 2:44 AM, Tom Lane wrote:
...
As noted elsewhere, it's highly likely that this has nothing to do with
the OS, and everything to do with write caching in the disks being 
used.

I assume you are benchmarking small individual transactions (one insert
per xact).  In such scenarios it's essentially impossible to commit 
more
than one transaction per revolution of the WAL disk, because you have 
to
write the same WAL disk page repeatedly and wait for it to get down to
the platter.  When you get results that are markedly in excess of the
disk RPM figure, it's proof positive that the disk is lying about write
complete (or that you don't have fsync on).

Tom, thanks for this explanation - we'll check this out straight away, 
but it would explain a lot.

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[PERFORM] insert speed - Mac OSX vs Redhat

2004-01-15 Thread Syd
I've read most of the threads on insert speed in this list and wanted 
to share some interesting observations and a question.

We've been benchmarking some dbs to implement Bayesian processing on an 
email server. This involves frequent insert and updates to the 
following table:

create table bayes_token (
username varchar(200) not null default '',
token varchar(200) not null default '',
spam_count integer not null default 0,
ham_count integer not null default 0,
atime integer not null default 0,
primary key (username, token));
On a variety of hardware with Redhat, and versions of postgres, we're 
not getting much better than 50 inserts per second. This is prior to 
moving WAL to another disk, and fsync is on.

However, with postgres 7.4 on Mac OSX 10.2.3, we're getting an amazing 
500 inserts per second.

We can only put this down to the OS.

Can anyone shed light on why Redhat appears to be so much poorer than 
Mac OS X in supporting postgres insert transactions? Or why MacOS 
appears to be so much better?

BTW, on the same hardware that postgres is running on to get 50 inserts 
per sec, MySQL (4.0.17) is getting an almost unbelievable 5,500 inserts 
per second.

-SL

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