[Benchmarking] Some thoughts about a disk bound test

[Andrea Aime]

Hi,
I was thinking about the possibility of making a disk bound
test next year.
The current server setup is quite un-balanced on that point of
view: we have 8 cpu's (which allows for a good cpu bound testing)
but the disk subsystem is low performance, single disk with rather
low throughput and high seek times (mind, I'm not complaining,
I'm very grateful we have such hardware to start with, just making
an honest assessment of what I think would be necessary to perform
a disk bound test).

If next year we're going to make a I/O bound testing we should make
sure we have a better disk subsystem, which also implies we should
look for funding to get one.

I believe at the very least we should look for a RAID-5, 3 disk setup,
to be installed on both WMS servers and on the database server
as well. Maybe three caviar black drives? However each of them
is quite pricey...
There is also the option of software vs harward RAID.
I've heard good things about the software RAID built into the
Linux kernel, no idea if Windows has anything similar, and how
good that is.

Funding options:
- OSGeo itself (ok, I'm probably dreaming here)
- every team taxes itself. If we're 8 and we go for a software
   raid solution this could be around 100-200$ per team?
- we find some test sponsor that wants to stick its label
   on the presentation somewhere

Opinions, suggestions?

Cheers
Andrea


-- 
Andrea Aime
OpenGeo - http://opengeo.org
Expert service straight from the developers.