>>>>> "nikolaus" == nikolaus <nikolaus@dilger.cc> writes:
nikolaus> Of course can software RAID be faster than hardware RAID.
nikolaus> But then you are not comparing the best offerings of each
nikolaus> category. Software RAID is usually cheaper than hardware.
nikolaus> But again you may be able to construct a product pairing
nikolaus> where it is reverse.
No... I admit... if you're willing to spend huge $$'s, there exist
hardware solutions that outpace software. It usually means that you
have hardware that is more powerful than your main system, though.
Often more costly, too.
nikolaus> raw versus file system is an old battle. raw is faster
nikolaus> because it does not have the filesystem overhead. However,
nikolaus> raw is a little harder to administer. Question is how much
nikolaus> faster raw is and if it is worth the trouble. Numbers
nikolaus> usually quoted are 10-20%. And here things may be changing
nikolaus> as operating systems and chaching algorithems get better to
nikolaus> mask the file system overhead. As I mentioned the question
nikolaus> is mute for PostgeSQL because raw is currently not
nikolaus> supported.
Well... I don't think your raw write performance (in, say, FreeBSD)
would be any more than 5% better than filesystem writing. Old
filesystem overhead consisted of the in-order writes that were
required to update filesystem metadata... which (consequently) was
about 20% in-order (vs. un-ordered) writes.
Softupdates (FreeBSD) only requires 1%-ish (or less) in-order writes
(or to put it another way: 1% of writes chosen before they would
otherwise happen).
DAve.
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|David Gilbert, Velocet Communications. | Two things can only be |
|Mail: dgilbert@velocet.net | equal if and only if they |
|http://daveg.ca | are precisely opposite. |
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