J-Development

In a previous blog entry (One DVD per second) we described how we build a new fast SSD based Database server and how we benchmarked it.

This week we put the new SSD DB server to the ultimate test, namely “Going Live”.

It turned out that our investments definitely payed off. Our main online application M4N has seen a massive speed improvement. We found an average performance increase of ~6 times for all queries. As a result, the initial average performance increase for the whole application is approximately a factor 2. Keep in mind that the whole application depends on more than just the main DB. Of course, the performance of the Java Application Server and the network bandwidth play important roles as well.

The performance increase is most apparent when simply browsing through the different pages of the application. The whole experience now feels very snappy and even the more complex pages load nearly instantly. We have statistics on our average page speeds so I included this in the pictures.

Picture one the improvements with testing:

Speed improvements new database server SSD Postgresql

Picture two the improvements with speed on execution of queries:

Statistics speed improvement Postgresql database

Finally, during the night we execute a slew of maintenance queries. Normally, we see a number like this after the script that triggers these queries has finished executing:


real 348m6.451s
user 0m4.912s
sys 0m0.808s


The other morning however we saw this:


real 30m34.747s
user 0m2.752s
sys 0m1.008s


This amounts to a performance increase of over 11 times.

For now we thus carefully conclude that using SSDs indeed improves performance by a large margin.

We work with Postgresql and are very happy with the performance and the existence of the DB. We are also very happy with the new full text search.
But what happened while we searched on the Postgresql website searching for documentation?
We search on:
http://search.postgresql.org/search?q=All

Our result on the search term “ALL” was:

“Your search for All returned no hits“.

Searching for LIMIT ALL or “LIMIT ALL” (more specifically the thing I was searching for) the “ALL” was ignored and hits including “LIMIT” only were returned.

I tried some more words like, “This”, “because” and “that”. None of them gave any result.

Look at the slogan on the right side of the site:
“The world most advanced opensource database“?
This give us some really nice thoughts!