Re: Sun vs. Mac

On Tue, 14 Jan 2003, CaptainX0r wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I'm having some serious performance issues with PostgreSQL on
> our newish SunFire 280R (1 900MHz ultrasparc III, 1 GB RAM).
> It's painfully slow. It took me almost a week of tuning to get
> it in the range of an old Mac G3 laptop. Now, a few days later,
> after tweaking every nearly every parameter (only noting
> decreased performance on some) in /etc/system and
> $PGDATA/postgresql.conf it's about as fast as I can make it, but
> still horribly slow. A few simple queries that take 1.5-7
> minutes on the G3 take 1-1.5 minutes on the Sun. A bulk load of
> roughly 2.4 GB database dump takes ~1 hour on each machine. It
> took almost 2 hours on the Sun before I turned off fsync.

Just for giggles, do you have a spare drive or something you can try
loading debian or some other Sparc compatible linux distro and get some
numbers? My experience has been that on the same basic hardware, Linux
runs postgresql about twice as fast as Solaris, and no amount of tweaking
seemed to ever get postgresql up to the same performance on Solaris. It's
so bad a Sparc 20 with 256 Meg ram and a 50 MHz 32 bit CPU running linux
was outrunning our Sun Ultra 1 with 512 Meg ram and a 150 MHz 64 bit CPU
by about 50%. That was with the 2.0.x kernel for linux and Solaris 7 on
the Ultra I believe. Could have been older on the Solaris version, as I
wasn't the SA on that box.