Thread: Extreme PostgreSQL?

We're getting ready to do system upgrades to our postgresql hosting
cluster. Currently, we're using
8-core servers with 32 GB of RAM in each to host approximately 75 end
user databases per server. I'm wondering
if there are particular performance bottlenecks we should be aware of as
we scale the hardware up? Does
PG handle 64 GB of RAM well? 128 GB? 16 cores? 48 cores? SAS/SATA III
with SSDs? (etc.)

A bit of Googling found this thread indicating potential performance
issues at 28ish cores a couple years back
http://postgresql.1045698.n5.nabble.com/MIT-benchmarks-pgsql-multicore-up-to-48-performance-td3173545.html

Thanks,

Ben

On Wed, 2012-05-23 at 14:37 -0700, Lists wrote:
> I'm wondering if there are particular performance bottlenecks we
> should be aware of as  we scale the hardware up? Does
> PG handle 64 GB of RAM well? 128 GB? 16 cores? 48 cores? SAS/SATA III
> with SSDs? (etc.)

These are not "extreme" for PostgreSQL. PostgreSQL 9.2 will be able to
scale up to 64 cores. I know a 9.1 installation that runs on a 48-core
machine. It also depends on the application behavior, though.

More RAM is nice, and if you can fit your data to the RAM, you will feel
more comfortable.

For details about SSD, please look at pgsql-performance archives. You
will see lots of posts there (or just search for posts from Greg Smith,
it will be a shortcut to the solution)

Regards,

--
Devrim GÜNDÜZ
Principal Systems Engineer @ EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
PostgreSQL Danışmanı/Consultant, Red Hat Certified Engineer
Community: devrim~PostgreSQL.org, devrim.gunduz~linux.org.tr
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