Re: same question little different test MSSQL vrs Postgres

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We've done some pretty extensive benchmarking and load testing on a
couple of platforms including the Xeon and Opteron. You may have already
bought that Dell box, but I'll say it anyway. Xeon quad processors are a
terrible platform for postgres. Trying to use more than 4GB of memory on
a 32 bit machine is a waste of money.

If you want performance, get a quad Opteron with the same amount of
memory. I guarantee you'll see at least an order of magnitude
performance improvement and substantially more under highly concurrent
loads. If you decide to go this way, HP sells a very nice box. I also
strongly recommend you investigate SuSE instead of RedHat. Fedora core
is good technology, but SuSE offers equally good technology with better
support.

Also make sure that your SCSI HBA is actually using the 64 bit PCI bus.
There are cards out there which plug into 64 bit PCI but only actually
address 32 bits (Qlogic's QLA2340 / 2342 for example).

You make no mention of the disk subsystem you plan to use. This is most
critical part of your system. Database performance is almost always
bound by IO. Usually disk IO. Briefly, put PGDATA on the widest RAID 10
array of disks you can manage. It's not worth spending the extra money
to get 15kRPM disks for this. The size of the disks involved is pretty
much irrelevant, only the number of them matters. Put the WAL files on a
dedicated RAID 1 pair of 15kRPM disks. Put the postgres log files (or
syslog) on a seperate filesystem.

- --
Andrew Hammond 416-673-4138 ahammond(at)ca(dot)afilias(dot)info
Database Administrator, Afilias Canada Corp.
CB83 2838 4B67 D40F D086 3568 81FC E7E5 27AF 4A9A

Joel Fradkin wrote:
| The postgres is running on Linux Fedora core 3 (production will be
redhat on
| Dell 4 proc 8 gig box).
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