3x200GB suggests you want to use RAID5?
Perhaps you should just pick 2x200GB and set them to RAID1. With roughly
200GB of storage, that should still easily house your "potentially
10GB"-database with ample of room to allow the SSD's to balance the
writes. But you save the investment and its probably a bit faster with
writes (although your raid-card may reduce or remove the differences
with your workload).
You can then either keep the money or invest in faster cpu's. With few
concurrent connections the E5-2643 (also a quad core, but with 3.3GHz
cores rather than 2.4GHz) may be interesting.
Its obviously a bit of speculation to see whether that would help, but
it should speed up sorts and other in-memory/cpu-operations (even if
you're not - and never will be - cpu-bound right now).
Best regards,
Arjen
On 3-5-2013 1:11 Mike McCann wrote:
> Hello,
>
> We are in the fortunate situation of having more money than time to help
> solve our PostgreSQL 9.1 performance problem.
>
> Our server hosts databases that are about 1 GB in size with the largest
> tables having order 10 million 20-byte indexed records. The data are
> loaded once and then read from a web app and other client programs.
> Some of the queries execute ORDER BY on the results. There are
> typically less than a dozen read-only concurrent connections to any one
> database.
>
> SELECTs for data are taking 10s of seconds. We'd like to reduce this to
> web app acceptable response times (less than 1 second). If this is
> successful then the size of the database will grow by a factor of ten -
> we will still want sub-second response times. We are in the process of
> going through the excellent suggestions in the "PostgreSQL 9.0 High
> Performance" book to identify the bottleneck (we have reasonable
> suspicions that we are I/O bound), but would also like to place an order
> soon for the dedicated server which will host the production databases.
> Here are the specs of a server that we are considering with a budget of
> $13k US:
>
> HP ProLiant DL360p Gen 8
> Dual Intel Xeon 2.4GHz 4-core E5-2609 CPUs
> 64GB RAM
> 2x146GB 15K SAS hard drives
> 3x200GB SATA SLC SSDs
> + the usual accessories (optical drive, rail kit, dual power supplies)
>
> Opinions?
>
> Thanks in advance for any suggestions you have.
>
> -Mike
>
> --
> Mike McCann
> Software Engineer
> Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute
> 7700 Sandholdt Road
> Moss Landing, CA 95039-9644
> Voice: 831.775.1769 Fax: 831.775.1736 http://www.mbari.org
>