This chapter aims to help prioritize spending when planning out the purchase of a new server intended to run PostgreSQL. If you already have a running database server, then following the instructions in, Chapter 3, Database Hardware Benchmarking, and Chapter 8, Database Benchmarking, might be a more appropriate place to start. Ultimately, you may end up taking a few round trips alternating through that material and what's covered here. For example, if you benchmark your server and the disks seem slow, the background here might give you an idea of what hardware change you could make to improve that. Once that's done, it's back to benchmarking again; repeat until performance matches your expectations.
In this chapter, we will ...
