[nmglug] Production server question

[Brendan]

Andres Paglayan wrote:
> what a good layout for the db and we would be?

You mean like a stripe layout for the underlying fs/raid?  If you're 
getting a lot of concurrent accesses from different users you want to 
have large enough stripes that (hopefully) any given access will only 
trigger a seek on a single disk.  Since seeks are expensive, you want to 
keep simultaneous access to the same spindle to a minimum.  It all 
depends on the access pattern.  If you're heavy on read operations and 
light on writes, RAID5 or 6 will give you good performance and large 
volume size.  If writes are more prominent, you may need to use 
non-parity RAID like RAID10 to keep the data moving.  If you're really 
lucky, your entire db will fit in memory via disk cache and there will 
only be the occasional write.

-Brendan