Re: Value of Quad vs. Dual Processor machine

One thing I learned after spending about a week comparing the Athlon (2
ghz, 333 mhz frontside bus) and Xeon (2.4 ghz, 266 mhz frontside bus)
platforms was that on average the select queries I was benchmarking ran
30% faster on the Athlon (this was with data cached in memory so may not
apply to the larger data sets where I/O is the limiting factor.)

I benchmarked against the Opteron 244 when it came out and it came in
about the same as the Athlon (makes sense since both were 333 mhz
memory). The results within +/- 5-10% that of the Athlon. From testing
against a couple of other machines I noticed that the memory bus speeds
were almost directly proportional to the query times under these
conditions.

Not sure how these compare against the quad sun but the AMD chips
returned the select queries faster than the Xeons from the informal
investigations I did. Definitely try it before you buy it if possible.

-----Original Message-----
From: pgsql-performance-owner(at)postgresql(dot)org
[mailto:pgsql-performance-owner(at)postgresql(dot)org] On Behalf Of Chris Field
Sent: Tuesday, November 11, 2003 6:13 PM
To: Ron Johnson; PgSQL Performance ML
Subject: Re: [PERFORM] Value of Quad vs. Dual Processor machine

we are looking at Xeon, We are currently running it on a quad sun v880
compiled to be 64bit and have been getting dreadful performance. I
don't think we really have much to gain from going 64bit.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Ron Johnson" <ron(dot)l(dot)johnson(at)cox(dot)net>
To: "PgSQL Performance ML" <pgsql-performance(at)postgresql(dot)org>
Sent: Tuesday, November 11, 2003 8:24 PM
Subject: Re: [PERFORM] Value of Quad vs. Dual Processor machine

> On Tue, 2003-11-11 at 17:32, Chris Field wrote:
> > We are getting ready to spec out a new machine and are wondering
> > about the wisdom of buying a quad versus a dual processor machine.
> > Seing as how postgres in not a threaded application, and this server

> > will only be used for log/transaction analysis (it will only ever
> > have a few large queries running). Is there any performance to be
> > gained, and if so is it worth the large cost? Any
> > thoughts/experience are much appreciated...
>
> Xeon or Opteron? The faster Opterons *really* blaze, especially in
> 64-bit mode. As others have said, though, RAM and I/O are most
> important.
>
> --
> -----------------------------------------------------------------
> Ron Johnson, Jr. ron(dot)l(dot)johnson(at)cox(dot)net
> Jefferson, LA USA
>
> "As I like to joke, I may have invented it, but Microsoft made it
> popular" David Bradley, regarding Ctrl-Alt-Del
>
>
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