Thread: - Advice about hardware configuration

- Advice about hardware configuration

From
Cedric BUSCHINI
Date:
Hi Everyone,

May I ask your advices about the following hardware configuration :
DELL PE2900 III - Quad-Core Xeon X5450 3.0GHz/2x6MB
4GB 667MHz
6 X 1TB SATA (7.200 rpm) RAID 1/0 or RAID 0/1
PERC 6/i Internal RAID Controller Card
80GB SATA 7.2K 3.5inch Front Bay HDD RAID 1
16x SATA DVD 1 S
Broadcom TCP/IP Offload Engine functionality
RedHat Enterprise Linux 5, 1

There are going to be 3 DB running on that machine and 10 users will
access to these 3 DBs.

Thanks

Re: - Advice about hardware configuration

From
"Phillip Smith"
Date:
> There are going to be 3 DB running on that machine and 10 users will
> access to these 3 DBs.

What kind of work will be being done? Is it going to have lots of reads
(such as Data Warehousing) or lots of writes?

I'd double the RAM, use 15k drives for the RAID-10 array and make sure
I used a 64-bit O/S.

RAM will make the biggest difference in performance.


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Re: - Advice about hardware configuration

From
"Phillip Smith"
Date:
>> I'd double the RAM, use 15k drives for the RAID-10 array and make sure
>> I used a 64-bit O/S.
>
> This may be a foolish question, but are people running windows 64-bit
> o/s, obviously the adoption rate is not as fast as Linux, but are users
> who are deploying Windows PostgreSQL servers, are they using 32 or
> 64 bit o/s?

Regarding performance of 64-bit in general, I posted this last year about
My 64-bit Data Warehouse running RedHat with PostgreSQL:
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-admin/2007-01/msg00307.php
> I have dual Xeon's in my DWH, and I used to run 32-bit which I upgraded to
> 64-bit over Christmas. We run a nightly import to that database which used
> to take around 5 hours which now completes in less than 1 hour.

I don't know that much about it in technical detail, but that's just my
experience.

As far as Windows 64-bit goes, I'm also running 64-bit on our MS SQL Server
for SAP and that box flies along under 64-bit. Barely breaks 30% usage with
around 80 users. Specs for that box are quad Xeon 64-bit processors (8
cores),
8gb RAM and RAID-10 SAS 15k disks.
(No, I didn't get a choice about Windows or MSSQL)

There are some conflicts between the 64-bit system and RadioBeacon / Valogix
which we had to do some trickery to get around, but in general it's quite
damn good.

Running 64-bit also allows the system to access and use over 4gb RAM without
having to get in to nasty things like PAE.


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