Hello!
We've just installed a couple new servers that will be our new database
servers. The basic hardware stats of each are:
2 x Xeon E5620 (2.4GHz quad-core)
32GB DDR3 1333 RAM
6 x 600GB 15krpm SAS drives - RAID 10
Perc 6/i RAID controller with battery backup
I've lurked on this list for a short while and gotten a small (tiny, I'm
sure) set of ideas about parameters that have commonly been mentioned
when performance tuning questions come up, but haven't had the freedom
to do much tuning to our existing setups. Now that we've got new
servers (and thus my tuning won't potentially impact production
performance until we roll these out), I've begun researching how I
should be tuning these to keep the speeds up in an environment where
we're regularly dealing with queries handling multiple tables with 20
million or more rows, and tables that grow by half a million records per
day.
I've found a great many resources suggesting settings to tune and even
some that suggest ways to determine the values to set for them, but I'm
having trouble tracking down anything CURRENT in terms of what options
to set and what values to give them. The most comprehensive lists of
suggestions (as provided by a few, though not a great many minutes
perusing Google results) list options that don't seem to exist anymore
(eg- sort_mem) in the version of 8.4 that Ubuntu currently has for 10.04
server (8.4.4).
Is there a reference I can look at that will give me a description of
how to determine sensible values for settings like shared_buffers,
effective_cache_size, etc. that I see discussed on this list and
elsewhere? If there isn't a really good reference, would any of you
mind suggesting sensible starting points for these options or methods
for determining what those would be, as well as other options I might
benefit from changing the values of?
I'm limited a bit in my tuning by the disks available - I can keep the
WAL on a separate partition in the array, but I wasn't able to allocate
an entire disk or separate array to it due to the amount of the
avaliable space I'll need for the databases these servers will house.
I've helped it a bit by using ext2 on the partition the WAL is on (the
databases themselves are on ext4), but I'm not sure what else I can do
in terms of tuning the WAL without re-thinking the storage setup.
Thanks in advance for any help you might be able to provide.
Bob Branch
