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Our postgres server is about hitting its capacity and we're looking into adding a second database server. Are there any scaling solutions that are particularly good for a postgres setup?
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The PostgreSQL database supports vertical scalability and can run on bigger and faster machines to increase the performance.
There are two main ways to scale our database… Horizontal Scaling (scale-out): It's performed by adding more database nodes creating or increasing a database cluster. Vertical Scaling (scale-up): It's performed by adding more hardware resources (CPU, Memory, Disk) to an existing database node.
PostgreSQL can scale rather well vertically. The more resources (CPU, memory, disk) that you can make available to your PostgreSQL server, the better it can perform.
With Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for PostgreSQL, you can scale a database instance vertically or horizontally. You implement vertical scaling by changing the DB instance type or size (for example, from M to R or from xlarge to 2xlarge), and scale horizontally by creating read replicas.
You are looking at a limited set of choices, very dependent on what your specific requirements are (read-to-write ratios and how tolerant your application is of occasional inconsistent reads [synchronous vs. asynchronous replication? master-slave vs. multi-master?], how strongly connected your tables are [clustering], etc.)
Over six years have elapsed since the original answer. Please refer to the High Availability, Load Balancing, and Replication chapter in the PostgreSQL documentation for the latest solutions available to you.
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Did you check what is your bottleneck? What are the queries that make your server work hard? Maybe it can be tuned better.
If tuning will not help it is often much easier to upgrade a server than to set replication. Adding some disks in RAID1 or RAID10, adding some RAM, more cores and faster processor. A good RAID controller with battery backed cache would make a big difference too.
Replication id good for high availability but often a bigger server will be more cost effective if you have performance problems.
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