Re: Sun vs. Mac

All,

> You should tell us about what version of Solaris you're
> running, what
> version of Postgres, and what options you have used.

You're right, sorry. PG 7.3.1 on Solaris 8. I've got the
default recommended /etc/system but with shmmax cranked way up
which seems to have helped. I don't have the system in front of
me (and it's down, so I can't get to it), but from memory
max_connections was increased to 64, shared_buffers up to 65536,
sort_mem and vacuum_mem were doubled, and I think that's it. I
changed every seemingly relevant one, and spent a lot of time on
the *cost section trying various factors of n*10 on each, with
no joy.

> Did you split
> the WAL onto its own filesystem? You'll get a big win that
> way.

I have not. What exactly do you by "own filesystem"? Another
filesystem? I was planning on putting pg_xlog on the OS disk
and moving $PGDATA off to a second disk.

> Also, what fsync setting are you using (open_datasync is the
> fastest in my experience).

I've read that somewhere (maybe in the archives?) and I got no
change with any of them. But now I'm thinking back - do I need
fsync=true for that to have an affect? I'm not worried about
the cons of having fsync=false at all - and I'm assuming that
should be better than true and open_datasync. Or am I confusing
things?

> Also, certain sort routines are abysmal. Replace the
> Solaris-provided qsort().

I've read about this as well - but haven't even gotten that far
on the testing/configuring yet.

> I have to say, however, that my experience indicates that
> Solaris is
> slower that the competition for Postgres. It still shouldn't
> be that bad.

I agree completely.

Thanks for your input,

-X

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