Michael Paquier - PostgreSQL committer

On this page are presented recommendations and general guidelines for hardware usage with PostgreSQL

1. Personal hardware
2. Cloud
3. Amazon Web Services (AWS)
4. Things to avoid

1. Personal hardware

• Get a lot of RAM, the more you do in cache, the better
• CPU is usually not the bottleneck… so…
• First step is hardware RAID, with:
• RAID10 for the main database
• RAID1 for the transaction logs
• RAID1 for the boot disk

2. Cloud

Some guidelines to choose correct hardware for a PostgreSQL server for a cloud.

• Get as much memory as you can
• Get one CPU core per 2 active connections (usually, few connections are active…)
• And hope that the I/O subsystem can keep up with your traffic

3. Amazon Web Services (AWS)

• Set up streaming replication
• Biggest instance you can afford
• EBS for the data and transaction logs
• Don’t use instance storage for any database data; OK for text logs
• random_page_cost = 1.1

4. Things to avoid

A couple of things you should avoid:

• Parity-disk RAID (RAID 5/6, Drobo, etc.)
• iSCSI, especially for transaction logs
• SANs, unless you can afford multichannel fibre
• Long network hauls between the app server and database server