Re: CPU

On Monday 03 December 2007, Tom Allison wrote:
> is there much of a difference in performance between a XEON, dual
> core from intel and a dual core AMD 64 CPU?
>
> I need a bit of an upgrade and am not sure which, if any, have a
> significant advantage for postgres databases.
>

Personally I've never seen postgresql suck majorly on CPU performance. I guess
the biggest speed increase lies in ultra fast I/O, i.e. high spinning disks
and battery backed hardware RAID. Databases tend to suck more on I/O than
processor unless you do a lot fo sorting, distinct selects etc.
Multi or single processor is just a matter of how many clients connect. AFAIK
postgresql is not really multi-threaded, but runs each connection (master
process) on one processor at a time. So if you have a quad core (or 4
processor machine), you'll have 4 postmasters "processing" any given time -
the bottleneck again is I/O because usually all processors share the same
ressources (memory and disks).

So basically I would invest in fast I/O and would care less about the
processors. More memory at hand may also be beneficial.

U.C.