PokerTracker

so i was just reading the links in another thread about a big database and i have a few questions (didn't want to hijack that thread).

so i play omaha, generally 4-6 tables, with PT omaha and Poker Ace, on full tilt. I have 2 databases, both postgres 8.3. the first one probably has a million hands, the second one half a million. there are probably 100k hands that are mine, the rest are datamined.

when i have 4-6 tables going i often get the yellow screen of death, especially when i leave a table or join a new table and the lobby comes up. it results in me being sat out on all my tables/hands.

so here are my questions: should i ditch postgres 8.3 and go postgres 8.2 so that i can create a cache? if so, can i do this without losing my current databases? also, does having up and refreshing a lot of stats (i have like 20 stats) every 5 hands slow me down?

any input on how i can improve performance would be much appreciated.

The cache would probably help, but you could try some performance tweaking first.
Performance Tuning: Hard Drives
Performance Tuning PostgreSQL

Do you have a decent fast hard disk with plentry of free space, and plenty of RAM?

I'm not sure whether backing up a DB and restoring in an earlier version of postgres will work, although I would expect so.
You should make sure you have a backup of the hand histories first too, and I would ask Pat in the PT2 forums before you try it.

thanks for the info white.

i'm performing defrag now and will do other performance related things as suggested.

here are the specs on my computer. i'm a tech donk, but here goes...

144 gb hard drive, 65% free space
HP Pavilion, AMD Athlon (tm) XP 3000, 2.10 GHz, 448 MB Ram.
I think it's maybe 2/3 years old?


should i get a new computer? add anything to current?

That's really not very much RAM and you will probably struggle to multitable.
I'm not a hardware expert either by any means so I'm not going to make any big suggestions, but you could try adding more RAM - that's a pretty cheap upgrade these days.

much thanks, white. dunno if it was the defrag or the memory tweaks (or both), but i got a huge boost in performance.

Great! Thanks for letting us know.