I set up a MonetDB server for a data mining team on a single node. The node's specs are 32 cores (4x8 AMD 2.3GHz) 128GiB RAM, with the dbfarm on a RAID0 2xSSD (I think they are Intel SSDs). MonetDB on this hardware works well for aggregates and joins on integers, but chugs considerably on inline views with strings and joins with strings. The team usually has 2-3 concurrent jobs at any given time, some materializing new tables, with lots of bulk loading ("copy into ... from file ..."). A typical table size is 2GiB, and queries may join 5-10 tables.
When I look at process activity on the node, I usually see each DB's mserver5 process pegged on CPU, using just a single core.
Since I rarely see more than one core used per mserver5, I'm starting to think either I haven't configured MonetDB to favor parallel plans, or I chose the wrong hardware for MonetDB.
So, as questions to everyone on the list, I'm curious 1) Are there knobs in MonetDB to favor parallel execution plans? 2) What's the ideal hardware for a single-node MonetDB server to support a workload of 2-5 concurrent queries? 3) What's the ideal disk configuration for the above?
Brien