Benjamin Krajmalnik wrote:
I ordered some massive servers, and in the course of benchmarking them following their instructions it exposed apparent hardware issues – so the 2 massive servers as well as one of the smaller ones got shipped back to the supplier for them to check it out. Had I assumed the servers were performing as the specs on paper indicated, I would have been in serious trouble a few months down the line as we would have reached limitations we were not aware of.
As a general statistic on this topic, about 1 out of every 3 servers I come across has a serious problem of this sort. Maybe half of those are just software misconfiguration that can be fixed before deployment, the rest are more serious issues. Nobody should every trust their hardware vendors to get things right, everyone's production schedules are just too tight nowadays relative to how complicated systems are. Benchmarking yourself is the only reasonable defense against this very common problem.
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Greg Smith 2ndQuadrant US greg@2ndQuadrant.com Baltimore, MD
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