Greetings -
I am testing a Sun Microsystems Sun Fire T2000 demo server at our
company. I want to know if anyone here has any experience with this
hardware and postgresql 8.1.3. I installed the copy of postgresql 8.1.3
from blastwave.org onto this demo box and loaded our production database
into it. This box has a single Ultrasparc T1 cpu with six execution
piplelines that can each handle 4 threads. With the Unix top utility
the postgresql server appears to bounce around between the available
threads on the system. For example I run a single large query and I can
see the postgresql server sometimes running on cpu/0, other times on
cpu/1, cpu/3,....etc up to cpu/23. However, never is the load for the
postgres server reported to be higher than 4.16%. I did the math and
4.16% x 24 threads = 98.84% cpu load. So I wonder if the Solaris 10
kernel is somehow throttling the processes so that any single virtual
processor can do no more than 4.16% load. We got this server last week
and I was able to install it in our rack just yesterday. Now I need to
see how I can optimize the postgresql server to work on this box. Does
anyone have any suggestions? I know the postgresql server is not smp
aware but I believe parts of it are. In particular the buffer manager
is supposed to scale the performance almost linearly with the number of
cpu's (including virtual ones). I don't know however, if I need to
recompile the postgresql server myself to get those benefits. I am
using the version of postgresql 8.1.3 that is available on
blastwave.org. I am also working with the 64 bit version of the
database server. This machine has over 8GB of ram so I was thinking of
using the 64 bit version of the postgresql server so I can access ram
beyong the 4gb limit imposed by 32 bit addressing. Any help or
recommendations for performance tweaking of postgresql is very much
appreciated.
Thanks,
Juan