What's the best way to use a Solid State HDD?

[Chris Gamache]

I'm using a TiGiJet 2GB Solid State drive. My thought was to place the WAL on
it to speed up writes. I don't know of any tools that exist to determine the
effectiveness of this except for anecdotal analysis (This type of query took 3
minutes yesterday, and 1 minute today) ... Sar gives me machine-wide stats, but
we do more than PostgreSQL here. I can enable stats, but will that tell me what
I'm looking for?

Vmstat reports no swapping of pages of ram to disk, so I don't think it would
make sense to make it a Linux Swap drive.

I suppose I could move some actual tables and indexes to the device.
Tablespaces might make this easy. I'm still using 7.4.3. If I had to pick
between tables and indexes, which would make more sense to put on the
solid-state device?

What would you do if you had a solid state hdd to use and you wanted to speed
up PostgreSQL?



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[Gaetano Mendola]

Post by Chris Gamache
I'm using a TiGiJet 2GB Solid State drive.

How much it cost ?

Post by Chris Gamache
My thought was to place the WAL on it to speed up writes. I don't know of any
tools that exist to determine the effectiveness of this except for anecdotal
analysis (This type of query took 3 minutes yesterday, and 1 minute today) ...
Sar gives me machine-wide stats, but we do more than PostgreSQL here. I can
enable stats, but will that tell me what I'm looking for?
Vmstat reports no swapping of pages of ram to disk, so I don't think it would
make sense to make it a Linux Swap drive.
I suppose I could move some actual tables and indexes to the device.
Tablespaces might make this easy. I'm still using 7.4.3. If I had to pick
between tables and indexes, which would make more sense to put on the
solid-state device?
What would you do if you had a solid state hdd to use and you wanted to speed
up PostgreSQL?

Depend what do you want obtain.
Do you want speed up writes ?
Are you annoyed by a full scan table that you can not avoid ?
or what ?



Regards
Gaetano Mendola

[Tom Lane]

Post by Chris Gamache
What would you do if you had a solid state hdd to use and you wanted
to speed up PostgreSQL?

"Put WAL on it" is certainly the default answer.

If you are mainly concerned about speeding up writes, then this is also
the correct answer. If you are mainly worried about read performance
then you might instead investigate pushing some critical tables/indexes
onto it.

regards, tom lane

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