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I am running a PostgreSQL 8.4.5 server on the linux 2.6.33.7 kernel on an 8 disk raid array with an LSI controller.

Most of the tables are around 1GB or less.

I know that XFS uses allocation groups (AG) to achieve I/O parallelism.

My first question is, does this mean that if two tables are in the same AG, all I/O requests are queued to both of them if either is being read from/written to?

If so, I assume I would want to spread my tables across as many allocation groups as possible, correct? Wouldn't this ensure that multiple users querying different tables would get the best performance?

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What is the partition size in gigabytes? I usually divide that by 4 in order to determine the number of XFS allocation groups. I've run into situations where I only had one allocation group, and had problems with repair with an error indicating that there wasn't another AG to refer to in the file repair process. Either way, I think the general rule is partition size/4. There's some level of parallelism when running I/O against multiple allocation groups. But I'm assuming there's diminishing return on that number, so anywhere between partitionsize/2 and partitionsize/4 is reasonable.

So for a 200GB partition named "partitionname" on /dev/sdb1, I'd probably use the following mkfs.xfs command sequence.

mkfs.xfs -f -L /partitionname -d agcount=50 -l size=128m,version=2 /dev/sdb1

Also see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XFS#Allocation_groups

and http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1479435 where it is noted:

At least one allocation group is needed per 4 gigs of space...
Cristian Ciupitu
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