Re: Linux v.s. Mac OS-X Performance

On Nov 9, 2007 10:55 PM, Mark Niedzielski <min(at)epictechnologies(dot)com> wrote:
>
> Our developers run on MacBook Pros w/ 2G memory and our production
> hardware is dual dual-Core Opterons w/ 8G memory running CentOS 5. The
> Macs perform common and complex Postgres operations in about half the
> time of our unloaded production hardware. We've compared configurations
> and the production hardware is running a much bigger configuration and
> faster disk.
>
> What are we missing? Is there a trick to making AMDs perform? Does
> Linux suck compared to BSD?

It's quite possible that either you've got some issue with poor
hardware / OS integration (think RAID controllers that have bad
drivers, etc) or that you've de-tuned postgresql on your CentOS
machines when you thought you were tuning it. A common mistake is to
set work_mem or shared_buffers so high that they are slower than they
would be if they were smaller.

Also, if your data sets in production are hundreds of millions of
rows, and the test set on your lap top is 100,000 rows, then of course
the laptop is going to be faster, it has less data to wade through.

So, the key question is what, exactly, is different between your dev
laptops and your production machines.