Re: PostgreSQL on Linux and Solaris comparison

scott.marlowe wrote:
> On 31 Oct 2002, Chris wrote:
>
> > Hi,
> >
> > I am using PostgresSQL 7.1.3 on both Linux and Solaris envrionment.
> > Development is using the Linux and production is using Solaris. I
> > experienced that the perfomrance on Solaris is much worse than Linux.
> > For example, the same query executed 9 seconds on Solaris and only 1
> > seconds on Linux.
> >
> > Is there any help upgrading the 7.1.3 to 7.2.3? Or how can I do some
> > performance tunning on Solaris?
>
> There are several issues at play here, some of which you can fix, some of
> which you can't.
>
> One is that older flavors of Solaris had a broken sort() command built
> into them that was VERY slow when sorting a list with lots of non-unique
> keys.

Right, in fact, I have seen no evidence that newer Solaris versions have
this fixed, so the problem may still exist, though there is a workaround
in 7.3beta.

> Another is that fact that Solaris has a "heavy process, light thread"
> scheduler design. This means that Solaris favors a few processes with
> many threads for good performance, while Postgresql is programmed on the
> many processes, what the heck is a thread design.

I didn't mention that because he was saying 1 vs. 9 seconds, so I
assumed process startup time was not an issue.

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