Schedule - PGConf.EU 2011

Bottom-up Database Benchmarking

Date: 2011-10-21
Time: 10:50–11:40
Room: Amsterdam 3
Level: Intermediate

Databases have unique consistency and workload requirements that still make hardware performance and choice critical. And particularly with the complexity of today's hardware, running your own bottom-up benchmarks is vital for defending against the very common hardware vendor errors you should expect to happen to you eventually, not be surprised by. A large percentage of new server hardware ships with at least one major performance issue. Deploy a production server without making sure the hardware itself performs as expected, and troubleshooting the resulting problems is vastly more difficult.

And the information you need to know to make informed hardware changes changes constantly. This session covers recent, unique research into database performance tuning, including a variety of custom-designed tools aimed at this area. The stream-scaling project provides a new way to visualize how memory performance scales with the number of active cores involved in the workload, a vital component to quantify on today's many core designs when running a database server. stream-scaling highlights the speed vs. capacity trade-offs in server memory you must be aware of to size the latest server hardware appropriately. The recently developed seek-scaling uses the same approach to reinvent measuring disk speed for databases much larger than the RAM in the server. seek-scaling makes it easy to compare traditional disk arrays against the latest memory and flash based devices. And the benchmarking automation set of pgbench-tools is now easier than ever to use for comparing the performance of different systems or server configurations.

Speaker

Greg Smith

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