[oclug]PostgreSQL Hardware

[Milan Budimirovic]

Phil Tanguay wrote:

> Well, first off, I don't really want to particpate in the "he said, (s)he
> said" you guys are playing with, but I'll throw this in to the equation :
> 
> It seems to me that most often, when I see a web site "slashdotted", the
> pages have lovely "mySql error: could not open connection" or somesuch.  So I
> tend to agree with Brad on this count, usually what seems to fall over first
> is the DB server.

That means absolutely nothing. MySQL has an environmental variable that
sets the maximum number of connections, and the default value is very
low (I don't recall what it is offhand, but it's generally an order of
magnitude less than the server can handle -- like 100 vs. 1000+). When
you see an error of that type you are invariably because you are butting
your head up against an environmental setting, rather than the limits of
the database server itself.

 
> With that being said, the biggest issue here is that we don't have enough
> data to be able to make an intelligent comments : the way to design a system
> (and by system, I mean the combination of both the hardware and software) is
> by designing the application, and THEN picking the hardware and applying the
> most money to the components that need it most.  In my humble opinion,
> picking out the hardware first is a rookie mistake.   It unfortunately
> happens quite often, because buying hardware and spending money is "fun" :
> analyzing databases schemas and data flow, much less.
> 
> But in this situation, with our lack of knowledge of the problem domain,
> we're left to make blanket statements that are at best, sometimes true,
> sometimes not.  Much like I did in the first paragraph of this post. ;>
> 

It was my understanding that the application was aready built and that
the database was being imported from MS SQL Server, so there shouldn't
have been any major surprises here.