Memory

Server performance is highly dependent upon having sufficient memory. I/O requests that can be satisfied from a larger filesystem cache complete faster than requests that must be satisfied from beyond the filesystem cache.

Ensure that:

• the server doesn’t page or swap when it runs large queries
• the often-used pages from the db.* files can be cached in memory

Although most operations involve only a subset of files, multiple large operations can be performed simultaneously, and thus might require more memory to avoid paging.

Assuming you follow the best practice of having a device that contains only the database files, one way to determine if you have allocated sufficient memory is to verify that the physical read rate on this device is minimal.