[quoted text, click to view] "Matt" <matt@fruitsalad.org> wrote in message
news:b609190f.0405290005.4c21680a@posting.google.com...
> Hello
>
> We are upgrading our DB server to a new machine and there is a heated
> debate about what spec machine to use.
>
> We have on this server a 15 GB DB that handled around 2-3 million
> transactions / day, 50% updates and 50& reads roughly, the main goal
> since it is used by an interactive end user application is speed for
> updates and reads, it does not need to do any heavy calculations at
> all during daytime, at nighttime it does a lot of batch jobs, going
> through the data and inserting results into different tables.
>
> the main questions I have is:
There's a good book from MS Press on sizing SQL Servers. I don't have the
name off the top of my head.
As you note, the biggest thing is going to be the disk I/O.
As a point of reference I have a server that handles about 14 million
inserts a day. (and a roll-up job at night.)
It's a quad XEON 700Mhz 2MB CPU (so rather old).
3 physical arrays, 10K drives. All are RAID 10
It used to handle only about 7 million inserts a day, but we found a flaw in
the code that we fixed that allowed us to get more inserts.
(in fact used to max out at about 50-60% cpu and beyond that, we just
couldn't get any more inserts done. Code change allows it to run at nearly
100% CPU. So now the CPU is the bottleneck.)
[quoted text, click to view] >
> Single or Dual CPU
> AMD 64 or Intel CPU
> 2 or 4 GB of RAM
> DIsk Setup for max I/O, we are thinking, mirror for the OS, mirror for
> the DB logs and RAID 5 for the DB data, using 2 different RAID
> controllers to try and maximize disk I/O, keeping the logs and OS on
> one controller and DB data on the second controller.
>
> is there anything I need to watch out for? or something to pay more
> attention to than other things?
>
> ANy advice would be greatly appreciated
>
> rgds
>
> Matt
