Database Testing Continues
We’re continuing to test various solutions for the database scale issues we’ve run into. I’ve talked to a couple other developers in this space and they’ve been chuckling and nodding as they read through our previous post (having run into similar issues).
The good news is that we’ve got our new servers just about ready to install in the colo. Once we’ve got a solution we’re really happy with, we’ll be able to roll it out on more reasonable hardware pretty quickly.
Another piece of advice is to test under page load.
For example assume users are coming to your site while the DB has NOTHING buffered into memory. This way you can factor in worse case scenario.
If you want to duplicate this you can cat 5G file (memory +1G) to /dev/null . This way you’ll clear your filesystem buffer which is important for MyISAM. If you’re on INNODB don’t worry about it.. just restart mysql.
This is SUPER important because as your data grows your tests won’t hold up because the probability that data on disk is not in memory is high.
This rises as you aggregate more but your memory footprint stays the same.
why not Postgresql?