[geeks] Solaris Partitioning for Postgres

[Patrick Giagnocavo]

On Thu, Feb 24, 2005 at 02:06:31PM -0800, Al Literi wrote:
> Thank you.
> 
> I never dealt with this particular rdbms, and the basic question is
> how much of which partition to reserve. The box is going to serve as a
> testing/dev for a dba. The guy never dealt with Solaris and I never
> had an encounter with Postgres. I saw some notions of it going into
> /var and some - into /usr/local/../.., and I tend to symlink
> /usr/local to some dir in /opt.

PG uses regular files, and you can even move them easily enough if you
need to.

> For me main question at this point is the sizing of partitions and
> what spindle is to load with it.

Depends on your data, probably about 4GB will do it unless you have a lot.

Put PG on its own partition on the least-used disk.  If you can, put
it on the outside diameter of the disk, which is usually the blocks
starting from 0, this gives you a slight speed bump over putting the
data closer to the inner diameter.

Also, doublecheck the size of the buffers - default PG install uses
very few buffers for the shared memroy segment, bump it up and get
better performance. Since Solaris 9 and 10 have ufs logging, you can
disable WAL if you want to, gives better INSERT performance.

Cordially
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