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Just a question about your Postgresql server(s). On what hardware are you running Postgresql? (CPU, Memory, Disk configuration, RAID...)

I'm planning to buy a dedicaded server for my postgresql instance: - Dell R710 - Xeon E5520 x 1 - RAM: 24GB - 2x146GB SAS 15K RAID1 for OS + pg_xlog - 3x450 SAS 15K RAID5 OR 4x450GB SAS 15K RAID10 for database.

What do you think about this config?

Thank You!

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why only one CPU? – warren Sep 21 '09 at 15:04
1 Xeon E5520 Quad Core is not enough to you? – Matthieu Sep 21 '09 at 15:45
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This question cannot be adequately answered without details on what kind of workload you expect. How many databases? How large are they? Transactions per second? Write-heavy? Read-heavy? What kind of data is stored (ie, binary, text, etc)? The more details you can provide, the more useful your answers will be. – sh-beta Sep 21 '09 at 16:47
ok, I understand. I'll work to give more informations. Sorry for this. – Matthieu Sep 22 '09 at 8:29
@Pol - I'd want to max the CPU utilization on my mainboard, personally - adding one later is harder than adding mroe RAM, for example :) – warren Sep 30 '09 at 11:27
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3 Answers

up vote 4 down vote

That system looks pretty good. Unless your load is read-only, you will likely first bottleneck on I/O. Avoid RAID5, go for RAID10.

Also, make sure you have plenty of battery backed cache memory on the RAID controller. That'll make a huge difference in write performance.

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bump for RAID 10, excellent choice in terms of speed/capacity/redundancy trade-offs. – Avery Payne Oct 9 '09 at 14:27
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up vote 2 down vote

Database server hardware is dependent on what you will be doing with it. You need to at least take a guess at your load (database size, transactions per hour, etc, etc) before you can properly spec your servers.

For instance, I run a postgresql database as part of an embedded system on a 1Ghz, single-core CPU with a 2Gig flash card for an HD and only 512megs of memory. Clearly this won't handle any kind of large loads, but for what we're doing it's perfectly fine.

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up vote 1 down vote

The only Postgre server we have is our HP Command View server as it insists on using Postgre (has no MSSQL or Oracle option). It's a HP BL460c G6 with dual Xeon E5540's, 12GB DDR3 and dual 146GB 6G SAS SFF disks running W2K3 EE 32-bit with an Emulex 4Gbps FC mezz HBA. It runs just fine.

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