Re: Tips & Tricks for validating hardware/os

You forgot pulling some RAID drives at random times to see how the hardware deals with the fact. And how it deals with
therebuild afterwards. (Many RAID solutions leave you with worst of both worlds, taking longer to rebuild than a
restorefrom backup would take, while at the same ime providing a disc IO performance that is SO bad that the server
becomesuseless during the rebuild) 

Andreas

-- Ursprüngl. Mitteil. --
Betreff:    Re: [PERFORM] Tips & Tricks for validating hardware/os
Von:    Greg Smith <gsmith@gregsmith.com>
Datum:        23.05.2007 05:15

On Tue, 22 May 2007, Stephane Bailliez wrote:

> Out of curiosity, can anyone share his tips & tricks to validate a machine
> before labelling it as 'ready to use postgres - you probably won't trash my
> data today' ?

Write a little script that runs pgbench in a loop forever.  Set your
shared_buffer cache to use at least 50% of the memory in the machine, and
adjust the database size and concurrent clients so it's generating a
substantial amount of disk I/O and using a fair amount of the CPU.

Install the script so that it executes on system startup, like adding it
to rc.local Put the machine close to your desk.  Every time you walk by
it, kill the power and then start it back up.  This will give you a mix of
long overnight runs with no interruption to stress the overall system,
with a nice dose of recovery trauma.  Skim the Postgres and OS log files
every day.  Do that for a week, if it's still running your data should be
safe under real conditions.

--
* Greg Smith gsmith@gregsmith.com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD

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