Re: SAN performance mystery - Mailing list pgsql-performance

From Mark Kirkwood
Subject Re: SAN performance mystery
Date
Msg-id 44973053.4080906@paradise.net.nz
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: SAN performance mystery  (Michael Stone <mstone+postgres@mathom.us>)
List pgsql-performance
Michael Stone wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 19, 2006 at 08:09:47PM +1000, Tim Allen wrote:
>> Certainly, the read performance of the SATA disk still beats the SAN,
>> and there is no way to lie about read performance.
>
> Sure there is: you have the data cached in system RAM. I find it real
> hard to believe that you can sustain 161MB/s off a single SATA disk.
>

Agreed - approx 60-70Mb/s seems to be the ballpark for modern SATA
drives, so get get 161Mb/s you would need about 3 of them striped
together (or a partially cached file as indicated).

What is interesting is that (presumably) the same test is getting such
uninspiring results on the SAN...

Having said that, I've been there too, about 4 years ago with a SAN that
had several 6 disk RAID5 arrays, and the best sequential *read*
performance we ever saw from them was about 50Mb/s. I recall trying to
get performance data from the vendor - only to be told that if we were
doing benchmarks - could they have our results when we were finished!

regards

Mark


pgsql-performance by date:

Previous
From: Stephen Frost
Date:
Subject: Re: SAN performance mystery
Next
From: Brian Hurt
Date:
Subject: Some performance numbers, with thoughts