Configuration Optimisation

Hi,

I am trying to optimise a database server to give the best performance
possible, so I switched from windows 2k3 to linux (ubuntu 9.10) on the
basis that most people seem to be of the opinion that postgres runs
better on linux than windows. To test my optimisation of the system, I
run a simple pgbench setup for 2 minutes. Not very scientific I realise
but it has helped me tune systems quite well in the past.

My problem is that I am getting nowhere near the performance of windows
on my linux build.

For example,

Test setup: pgbench -i -s 5
Test run: pgbench -T 120

You may think this is a short test, but running it for much longer does
not seem to make a significant difference.

Now running on windows I get ~ 700 TPS, but on linux I am getting ~70 TPS.

The hardware configuration is Dual Opteron, 8GB Ram and 4 sata disks in
a Hardware Raid 10 configuration.

There is a change in hardware configuration, from Raid5 on the Windows
system - But I would expect that switching to raid 10 would give a
performance boost.

Here are some of the changed settings in my liunx configuration:

shared_buffers = 1900MB
work_mem = 50MB
checkpoint_segments = 32

Am I missing something obvious - or is it a waste of time using the
pgbench as a judge of optimisation in these circumstances?

Thanks.

Howard Cole
www.selestial.com