Re: Performance on 8CPU's and 32GB of RAM

On 9/5/07, Carlo Stonebanks <stonec(dot)register(at)sympatico(dot)ca> wrote:
> Unfortunately, LINUX is not an option at this time. We looked into it; there
> is no *NIX expertise in the enterprise. However, I have raised this issue in
> various forums before, and when pressed no one was willing to say that "*NIX
> *DEFINITELY* outperforms Windows" for what my client is doing (or if it did
> outperform Windows, that it would outperform so significantly that it
> merited the move).

Where unixes generally outperform windows is in starting up new
backends, better file systems, and handling very large shared_buffer
settings.

> Was this incorrect? Can my client DEFINITELY expect a significant
> improvement in performance for what he is doing?

Depends on what you mean by incorrect. Windows can do ok. But pgsql
is still much newer on windows than on unix / linux and there are
still some issues that pop up here and there that are being worked on.
Plus there's still no real definitive set of guidelines to tune on
Windows just yet.

> DISK subsystem reports: SCSI/RAID Smart Array E200 controller using RAID 1.

So, just two disks? for the load you mentioned before, you should
probably be looking at at least 4 maybe 6 or 8 disks in a RAID-10.
And a battery backed cache. I've seen reports on this list of the
E300 being a pretty mediocre performer. A better controller might be
worth looking into as well.