Re: bad performance on Solaris 10

Bruce,

On 4/12/06 12:56 PM, "Bruce Momjian" <pgman(at)candle(dot)pha(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:

> It is hard to imagine why people spend so much time modifying Sun
> machines run with acceptable performance when non-Sun operating systems
> work fine without such hurtles.

There are a lot of Solaris customers that we support and that we'd like to
support. To many of them, Solaris has many advantages other than speed,
though they expect a reasonably comparable performance, perhaps within a
factor of 2 of other options.

Oracle has spent a great deal of time (a decade!) optimizing their software
for Solaris, and it shows. There are also some typical strategies that
Solaris people used to use to make Solaris perform better, like using VxFS
(Veritas Filesystem), or Oracle Raw IO to make their systems perform better.

Lately I find people are not so receptive to VxFS, and Sun is promoting ZFS,
and we don't have a reasonable near term option for Raw IO in Postgres, so
we need to work to find a reasonable path for Solaris users IMO. The long
delays in ZFS production haven't helped us there, as the problems with UFS
are severe.

We at Greenplum have worked hard over the last year to find options for
Postgres on Solaris and have the best configuration setup that we think is
possible now on UFS, and our customers benefit from that. However, Linux on
XFS or even ext3 is definitely the performance leader.

- Luke