Re: Sun Donated a Sun Fire T2000 to the PostgreSQL

> I am thrill to inform you all that Sun has just donated a fully loaded
> T2000 system to the PostgreSQL community, and it's being setup by Corey
> Shields at OSL (osuosl.org) and should be online probably early next
> week. The system has
>
> * 8 cores, 4 hw threads/core @ 1.2 GHz. Solaris sees the system as
> having 32 virtual CPUs, and each can be enabled or disabled individually
> * 32 GB of DDR2 SDRAM memory
> * 2 @ 73GB internal SAS drives (10000 RPM)
> * 4 Gigabit ethernet ports
>
> For complete spec, visit
> http://www.sun.com/servers/coolthreads/t2000/specifications.jsp
>
> I think this system is well suited for PG scalability testing, among
> others. We did an informal test using an internal OLTP benchmark and
> noticed that PG can scale to around 8 CPUs. Would be really cool if all
> 32 virtual CPUs can be utilized!!!

Interesting. We (some Japanese companies including SRA OSS,
Inc. Japan) did some PG scalability testing using a Unisys's big 16
(physical) CPU machine and found PG scales up to 8 CPUs. However
beyond 8 CPU PG does not scale anymore. The result can be viewed at
"OSS iPedia" web site (http://ossipedia.ipa.go.jp) Our conclusion was
PG has a serious lock contention problem in the environment by
analyzing the oprofile result.

You can take a look at the detailed report at:
http://ossipedia.ipa.go.jp/capacity/EV0604210111/
(unfortunately only Japanese contents is available at the
moment. Please use some automatic translation services)

Evalution environment was:
PostgreSQL 8.1.2
OSDL DBT-1 2.1
Miracle Linux 4.0
Unisys ES700 Xeon 2.8GHz CPU x 16 Mem 16GB(HT off)
--
Tatsuo Ishii
SRA OSS, Inc. Japan