Re: PostgreSQL on VMWare vs Windows vs CoLinux

Vitaly Belman <vitalib(at)012(dot)net(dot)il> writes:

> With all that said, VMWare is badly suited for running a database,
> while CoLinux can be run as a service (didn't try it yet though),
> VMWare always sits there, it is slow to go up, slow to go down and
> generally feels like a system hog.

Uhm, it sounds like you're using VMWare Workstation? VMWare has a range of
different versions including some that are specifically targeted towards
server situations. I think they had the idea that hosting companies would run
hundreds of virtual machines on a server and provide their hosting clients
with a virtual machine to play with.

That said, I'm curious why the emulated servers performed better than the
Native Windows port. My first thought is that they probably aren't syncing
every write to disk so effectively they're defeating the fsyncs, allowing the
host OS to buffer disk writes.

I would be curious to see better stats on things like a pgbench run which
would give some idea of the context switch efficiency, and a large select or
update, which would give some idea of the i/o throughput. Really there's no
excuse for the Windows port to be slower than an emulator. Barring effects
like the disk caching I mentioned, it should far outpace the emulators.

--
greg