big database, lots of stats, poor performance, PT-Omaha

[jamiezig]

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.

[WhiteRider]

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.

[jamiezig]

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?

[WhiteRider]

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.

[jamiezig]

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

[WhiteRider]

Great! Thanks for letting us know.