I need to build a new high performance server to replace our current production database server.
The current server is a SuperMicro 1U with 2 RAID-1 containers (one for data, one for log, SAS - data is 600GB, Logs
144GB),16GB of RAM, running 2 quad core processors (E5405 @ 2GHz), Adaptec 5405 Controller with BBU. I am already
havingserious I/O bottlenecks with iostat -x showing extended periods where the disk subsystem on the data partition
(theone with all the random i/o) at over 85% busy. The system is running FreeBSD 7.2 amd64 and PostgreSQL 8.4.4 on
amd64-portbld-freebsd7.2,compiled by GCC cc (GCC) 4.2.1 20070719 [FreeBSD], 64-bit.
Currently I have about 4GB of shared memory allocated to PostgreSQL. Database is currently about 80GB, with about 60GB
beingin partitioned tables which get rotated nightly to purge old data (sort of like a circular buffer of historic
data).
I was looking at one of the machines which Aberdeen has (the X438), and was planning on something along the lines of
96GBRAM with 16 SAS drives (15K). If I create a RAID 10 (stripe of mirrors), leaving 2 hot spares, should I still
placethe logs in a separate RAID-1 mirror, or can they be left on the same RAID-10 container?
On the processor front, are there advantages to going to X series processors as opposed to the E series (especially
sinceI am I/O bound)? Is anyone running this type of hardware, specially on FreeBSD? Any opinions, especially
concerningthe Areca controllers which they use?
The new box would ideally be built with the latest released version of FreeBSD, PG 9.x. Also, is anyone running the
8.xseries of FreeBSD with PG 9 in a high throughput production environment? I will be upgrading one of our test
serversin one week to this same configuration to test out, but just wanted to make sure there aren't any caveats others
haveexperienced, especially as it pertains with the autovacuum not launching worker processes which I have experienced.
Best regards,
Benjamin
