Re: Upgrading to Solaris 9

Danielle Cossette wrote:
> Good morning,
>
> Could you please let me know if Postgres 7.1.3 will run on Solaris 9.
> If it does, are you aware of any issues.

I've run 7.1, 7.2 and 7.3 on Solaris 8 x86 and Solaris 9 x86. 7.1
install, config, run was nearly 100% hands-off. 7.3 takes setting
LD_LIBRARY_PATH to point to /usr/local/lib.

They've run fine for 3+ years ... except I had always allocated a
trivial amount of shared memory to Postgres. A few months back, I
decided to increase the shmmin/shmmax parameters to something a bit more
usable and the OS promptly kernel panic'd upon bootup. It took a few
tries to get values that worked. But this week, Solaris just went nuts
and kept kernel panicing until I dropped shared memory to next to
nothing -- which set Postgres performance back to be unusable.

I blew the OS away, installed Linux and everything runs fine. Actually
better than fine; better performance due to better drivers (especially
for ATA hard drives), better disk cache management, lower memory
footprint, etc. I had already switched to Linux on one server due to a
non-working LSI 32320-R driver and this shared memory problem has pretty
much cemented our plans to move off Solaris.