[SunRescue] solaris7 i/o tuning

[Patrick Giagnocavo]

On Mon, May 21, 2001 at 05:36:21AM -0400, Dave McGuire 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
zippy, provided you can stand its crappy subpar SQL interface (subselects,
transactions, and real ACID-ity just aren't there).  

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.

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.

./patrick