Postgres performance on Veritas VxVM - Mailing list pgsql-general

From River Tarnell
Subject Postgres performance on Veritas VxVM
Date
Msg-id 20091202085609.GH14028@loreley.flyingparchment.org.uk
Whole thread Raw
Responses Re: Postgres performance on Veritas VxVM  (Greg Smith <greg@2ndquadrant.com>)
List pgsql-general
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Hi,

I'm running Postgres 8.3.7 on Solaris 10 x64, using VxFS/VxVM 5.0 MP3.
I'm trying to determine the best storage configuration for my workload,
so I ran some tests of Postgres performance with various combinations of
VM and filesystem.  What I noticed was that when all other factors were
the same, running on VxVM was nearly twice as slow as running on a plain
disk.

My configuration was a VxFS filesystem mounted at /sql, 'noatime,cio',
and another mounted at /sql/pg_xlog,
'noatime,cio,mincache=direct,convosync=direct'.  This forced direct I/O
for the WAL.  Without VxVM, these filesystems were on plain disk slices.
With VxVM, I added the single disk to a diskgroup and created two
volumes on it for the filesystems, layout=concat, with the default
options.

The backend storage is a 14-disk RAID10 using an internal RAID card (Sun
StorageTek STK-RAID-INT), with 256MB battery-backed write cache.  The
system has 32GB RAM and nothing apart from Postgres was running on it
during the test.  The same postgresql.conf was used for both tests; I
configured 256MB of shared_buffers and 20 checkpoint_segments.

The benchmark I'm using is a database import tool called "osm2pgsql",
with a subset of our actual workload.  Without VxVM, the import
completed in 2 hours, 34 minutes.  With VxVM, it took 5 hours 7 minutes.

Has anyone else tested Postgres on VxVM and noticed such a large
performance hit?

    - river.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (HP-UX)

iEYEARECAAYFAksWK6kACgkQIXd7fCuc5vIJowCfUVLjDQ7R34n4QIls4Uenahoq
lNMAn3CO7zr+HIwirKZMl3YRtiFdMaY+
=/kND
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

pgsql-general by date:

Previous
From: Dave Page
Date:
Subject: Re: Build universal binary on Mac OS X 10.6?
Next
From: Craig Ringer
Date:
Subject: Re: how to install just client libraries on windows?