Heikki Linnakangas wrote:
> Lists wrote:
>> Server is a dual core xeon 3GB ram and 2 mirrors of 15k SAS drives (1
>> for most data, 1 for wal and a few tables and indexes)
>>
>> In total all databases on the server are about 10G on disk (about 2GB
>> in pgdump format).
>
> I'd suggest buying as much RAM as you can fit into the server. RAM is
> cheap, and with a database of that size more cache could have a dramatic
> effect.
I'll second this. Although it doesn't really answer the original
question, you have to keep in mind that for read-intensive workloads,
caching will give you the biggest benefit by far, orders of magnitude
more than replication solutions unless you want to spend a lot of $ on
hardware (which I take it you don't if you are reluctant to add new
disks). Keeping the interesting parts of the DB completely in RAM makes
a big difference, common older (P4-based) Xeon boards can usually be
upgraded to 12-16GB RAM, newer ones to anywhere between 16 and 192GB ...
As for replication solutions - Slony I wouldn't recommend (tried it for
workloads with large writes - bad idea), but PgQ looks very solid and
you could either use Londiste or build your own very fast non-RDBMS
slaves using PgQ by keeping the data in an optimized format for your
queries (e.g. if you don't need joins - use TokyoCabinet/Berkeley DB).
Regards,
Marinos
