Re: Sparc v Intel

andrew(dot)clark(at)sge(dot)net writes:
> I'm trying to find some hard data comparing PostgreSQL on Intel and Sparc
> platforms. Does anyone know where I can find data like this? Have an view
> on the subject? Does a 64 bit architecture make any difference with a
> small database? Large databases? If so how large?

Think I/O, not CPU. Big-iron Sparc boxes will probably have lots better
I/O than PC-grade hardware, and that translates directly to database
performance.

Which is not to say that you can't buy big-iron platforms with Intel
CPUs in 'em. But they're not consumer PCs. Be careful to compare
apples to apples.

As far as 32bit vs 64bit, my feeling is that the only immediate benefit
of 64bit is that you could load the thing with more than 4GB of RAM and
have *lots* of kernel disk buffers. This could be a serious win if your
database is large enough that the active page set exceeds 4GB.

Further out, we've speculated off and on about converting int8 and
float8 to pass-by-value datatypes on machines where Datum is 8 bytes.
That should make for a nice performance improvement on operations using
those datatypes. But it's not done yet and the actual benefit is hard
to guess.

regards, tom lane