Scott,
> I am certainly open to any suggestions on how to deal with speed issues
> on these sorts of large tables, it isn't going to go away for us. :-(
I'm not sure what to suggest. I can't think of anything off the top of my
head that would improve cripplingly slow random seek times.
This sort of problem has personally caused me to dump and replace various RAID
controllers in the past. I have to say that I have not been impressed with
the Mac as a database server platform in the past; I've had no end of issues
with memory and disk management.
I talked to the Apple Server staff at the last MacWorld about some of these
issues and they admitted that servers are still a "new thing" for Apple as a
company, and they're still tweaking OSX server.
BTW, I wasn't clear from your description: did you mean that you have 14
disks?
Oh, and for testing real random seek time, you can run bonnie++ which is
findable on freshmeat. This should give you a benchmark to e-mail the Apple
people. I'd be interested in being cc'd on your communications with them,
as we use OSX for webserving and would like to see better support for
database serving.
--
-Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco