Re: Upgrade to dual processor machine?

> The cache-field is saying 873548K cached at the moment
> Is this a "whole bunch of cache" in your opinion? Is it too much?

  Too much cache?  It ain't possible. ; )

  For what it's worth, my DB machine generally uses about 1.25 gigs for
disk cache, in addition to the 64 megs that are on the RAID card, and
that's just fine with me.  I allocate 256 megs of shared memory (32768
buffers), and the machine hums along very nicely.  vmstat shows that
actual reads to the disk are *extremely* rare, and the writes that come
from inserts/etc. are nicely buffered.

  Here's how I chose 256 megs for shared buffers:  First, I increased the
shared buffer amount until I didn't see any more performance benefits.
Then I doubled it just for fun. ; )

  Again, in your message it seemed like you were doing quite a bit of
writes - have you disabled fsync, and what sort of disk system do you
have?

steve