Re: Quad Xeon vs. Dual Itanium

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Andrew Sullivan [mailto:ajs(at)crankycanuck(dot)ca]
> Sent: Friday, February 13, 2004 9:05 PM
> To: pgsql-general(at)postgresql(dot)org
> Subject: Re: [GENERAL] Quad Xeon vs. Dual Itanium
>
>
> On Fri, Feb 13, 2004 at 10:46:18PM -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
>
> > Quite honestly, I suspect we may be wasting our time hacking the
> > Postgres buffer replacement algorithm at all. There are a bunch of
> > reasons why the PG shared buffer arena should never be more than a
> > small fraction of physical RAM, and under those conditions
> the cache
> > replacement algorithm that will matter is the kernel's, not ours.
>
> Well, unless the Postgres cache is more efficient than the OS's, no?.
> You could then use the nocache filesystem option, and just
> let Postgres handle the whole thing. Of course, that's a
> pretty big unless, and not one that I'm volunteering to make go away!

Most database systems I have tried scale very well with increased
memory.
For instance, Oracle, and SQL*Server will definitely benefit greatly by
adding more memory. I suspect (therefore) that there must be some way
to squeeze some benefit out of it.