Re: Drupal and PostgreSQL - performance issues?

On 14/10/2008, at 11.40, Ivan Sergio Borgonovo wrote:

> On Mon, 13 Oct 2008 20:45:39 -0600
> "Joshua Tolley" <eggyknap(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>>
>> PostgreSQL ships with a very conservative default configuration
>> because (among other things, perhaps) 1) it's a configuration
>> that's very unlikely to fail miserably for most situations, and 2)
>
> So your target are potential skilled DBA that have a coffe pot as
> testing machine?

Yeah, I don't know why the default configuration is targetting
something at least 5 years old. I figure its kinda rare with a
completely new installation of PostgreSQL 8.3.3 on such a machine.

>>> What I get with that kind of answer is:
>>> an admission: - PostgreSQL is slow
>
>> People aren't saying that. They're saying it works better when
>> someone who knows what they're doing runs it.
>
> I find this a common excuse of programmers.
> You user are an asshole, my software is perfect.
> It's not a matter of "better". When people comes here saying
> PostgreSQL perform badly serving Drupal the performance gap is not
> realistically described just with "better".

So, let me get this right, Joshua… You are targetting DBAs using
servers with less than 512 MB RAM.
Is PostgreSQL supposed to be used by professional DBAs on enterprise
systems or is it supposed to run out of the box on my old Pentium 3?

>>> But is PostgreSQL competitive as a DB engine for apps like Drupal
>>> for the "average user"?
>> So are we talking about the "average user", or someone who needs
>> real performance? The average user certainly cares about
>> performance, but if (s)he really cares, (s)he will put time toward
>> achieving performance.

That might be true, if the only demographic you are looking for are
professional DBAs, but if you're looking to attract more developers,
not having sensible defaults is not really a good thing.
While I'll probably take the time to learn more about how to tune
PostgreSQL, the common Drupal-developer developer will probably just
say "Ah, this is slow, I'll just go back to MySQL…".

I'm not saying that PostgreSQL should (or could) be just as fast as
MySQL, and while my benchmark was naïve, it's what a Drupal developer
will see when he decides to try out PostgreSQL. A 40% drop in page
loading performance. Yikes.

Even if you don't change the default configuration, you should at
least include some examples like "If you have modern webserver, this
is a good starting point (…) for more information about tuning
PostgreSQL, see http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.3/…"