Re: Question on hardware & server capacity

Steve,

>   We're splitting the front-end across a number of machines, but all of
> the various datasets are sufficiently intertwined that they all have to be
> in the same database.  I'm going to fiddle around with some of the
> available replication options and see if they're robust enough to put them
> into production.

2 other suggestions:

1. Both PostgreSQL Inc. and Command Prompt Inc. have some sort of pay-for HA
solution for Postgres.   Paying them may end up being cheaper than
improvising this yourself.

2. Zapatec Inc. has acheived impressive performance gains by putting the
database on a high-speed, HA gigabit NAS server and having a few "client
servers" handle incoming queries.     You may want to experiment along these
lines.

--
-Josh Berkus
 Aglio Database Solutions
 San Francisco