[SunRescue] solaris7 i/o tuning

[Dave McGuire]

On May 21, Patrick Giagnocavo wrote:
> >   Hey folks...can anyone here with some solaris experience (James L?)
> > give me any pointers for performance tuning on solaris7?  The machine
> > is an Ultra30 (250MHz) w/512MB RAM.  The application is a somewhat
> > large, primarily heavy-writing database application running MySQL
> > v3.23.38.  Writes will be coming in in 30-50Kbyte chunks a few times
> > per second from the network and the server must maintain real-time
> > responsiveness.
> > 
> >   Is there anything filesystem-wise that could be tuned to better
> > accomodate this type of activity, given that I know the
> > characteristics of the load?
> 
> 
> Actually the quick answer is to dump MySQL ASAP.
> 
> Is SUCKS for writes.  If your data is primarily read-only it is nice and

  Ack...ok, I'm open to alternatives.

> zippy, provided you can stand its crappy subpar SQL interface (subselects,
> transactions, and real ACID-ity just aren't there).  

  Well I certainly don't need any "fancy" SQL stuff...this is a simple
application.

> I don't know what you might try, except maybe turning on a big honking RAM
> disk and mounting the part of the filesystem that the DB tables reside on
> there.

  Can't do that...this is gonna be many gigabytes of data.

> Look into the latest version of PostgreSQL, which got rid of the 8KB limit
> on row length, and which has a REAL SQL parser, along with functions.  And
> writes don't cause readers to have to wait, and it has a REAL database
> engine that can even handle simultaneous writes to the DB without slowing
> everything to a crawl.

  Ok.  I used Postgres many years ago (before it had an SQL interface)
and did some neat things with it.  Is it stable enough for production
use nowadays?

               -Dave McGuire