[oclug]PostgreSQL Hardware

[Rod Giffin]

On Friday 25 October 2002 21:40, Timothy Brier wrote:
So let me throw in one new question to
> the mix, I have found that PostgreSQL is very fast with the fsync() turned
> off.  (As the manuals say it will be)  What is the opinion of having this
> off when you have file systems like ext3 available?  Is tar or cpio a good
> way to do a complete backup?

It depends on whether or not your application can be down for long enough to 
complete a manual backup.  You can also do hardware mirroring, and back up 
the mirror drive.  One of the nice things about allowing the database to back 
up itself is that in the event of data corruption, you can rebuild only part 
of the database rather than the entire table set.  That is a little harder to 
do from a tarball.

I'm sorry Timothy, I don't agree with the sentement expressed by everyone else 
here so far with regard to your server issues.  You are not talking about a 
really serious load there.  600,000 new records/month is something like 1.04 
new records/second over the course of an 8 hour day.  Your web server log 
file would be growing faster than that.  In fact, from a system engineering 
perspective, all that number should tell you is how much disk space you're 
going to need.  It doesn't say anything about the load on the server.

Rod.