Re: understanding postgres issues/bottlenecks - Mailing list pgsql-performance

From Stefano Nichele
Subject Re: understanding postgres issues/bottlenecks
Date
Msg-id bdb13b210901080036t2810e54at59818c40c0f93d39@mail.gmail.com
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In response to Re: understanding postgres issues/bottlenecks  ("Scott Marlowe" <scott.marlowe@gmail.com>)
Responses Re: understanding postgres issues/bottlenecks
Re: understanding postgres issues/bottlenecks
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Dell CERC SATA RAID 2 PCI SATA 6ch

Running lspci -v:

03:09.0 RAID bus controller: Adaptec AAC-RAID (rev 01)
        Subsystem: Dell CERC SATA RAID 2 PCI SATA 6ch (DellCorsair)
        Flags: bus master, 66MHz, slow devsel, latency 32, IRQ 209
        Memory at f8000000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=64M]
        Expansion ROM at fe800000 [disabled] [size=32K]
        Capabilities: [80] Power Management version 2


Any consideration looking at iostat output ?

Cheers and thanks to all!

ste


On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 10:31 PM, Scott Marlowe <scott.marlowe@gmail.com> wrote:
On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 2:02 PM, Stefano Nichele
> On Tue, Jan 6, 2009 at 7:45 PM, Scott Marlowe <scott.marlowe@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> I concur with Merlin you're I/O bound.
>>
>> Adding to his post, what RAID controller are you running, does it have
>> cache, does the cache have battery backup, is the cache set to write
>> back or write through?
>
>
> At the moment I don't have such information. It's a "standard" RAID
> controller coming with a DELL server. Is there any information I can have
> asking to the SO ?

You can run lshw to see what flavor controller it is.  Dell RAID
controllers are pretty much either total crap, or mediocre at best.
The latest one, the Perc 6 series are squarely in the same performance
realm as a 4 or 5 year old LSI megaraid.  The perc 5 series and before
are total performance dogs.  The really bad news is that you can't
generally plug in a real RAID controller on a Dell.  We put an Areca
168-LP PCI-x8 in one of our 1950s and it wouldn't even turn on, got a
CPU Error.

Dells are fine for web servers and such.  For database servers they're
a total loss.  The best you can do with one is to put a generic SCSI
card in it and connect to an external array with its own controller.

We have a perc6e and a perc5e in two different servers, and no matter
how we configure them, we can't get even 1/10th the performance of an
Areca controller with the same number of drives on another machine of
the same basic class as the 1950s.

>> Also, what do you get for this (need contrib module pgbench installed)
>>
>> pgbench -i -s 100
>> pgbench -c 50 -n 10000
>>
>> ? Specifically transactions per second?
>
> I'll run pgbench in the next days.

Cool.  That pgbench is a "best case scenario" benchmark.  Lots of
small transactions on a db that should fit into memory.  If you can't
pull off a decent number there (at least a few hundred tps) then can't
expect better performance from real world usage.

Oh, and that should be:

pgbench -c 50 -t 10000

not -n... not enough sleep I guess.

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