interesting benchmarks PG/Firebird Linux/Windows fsync/nofsync

Hello,

just recently I held a short course on PG.

One course attendant, Robert Dollinger, got
interested in benchmarking single inserts (since
he currently maintains an application that does
exactly that on Firebird and speed is an issue
there).

He came up with a table that I think is interesting
for other people so I asked permission to publish
it on this list.

Here it is:
http://1006.org/pg/postgresql_firebird_win_linux.pdf

Note: some german words are there, I can't change
the pdf, so here's a short explanation:

He tested the speed of 4000 inserts through a Delphi
application with zeos components.

the 3 parameters are:

* transaction
  - single: all 4000 inserts inside 1 transaction
  - multi: 4000 inserts with 4000 commits

* fsync (for PG) or forced writes (for FB)
  - true/false

* "Verbindung" = connection
  - local
  - LAN
  - wireless

  notes: the server ran either on a windows desktop
  machine or a linux laptop; the client allways ran
  on the windows desktop

Timings are in msec, note that you cannot directly
compare Windows and Linux Performance, since machines
were different.

You can, however, compare PG to Firebird, and you
can see the effect of the 3 varied parametert.

One thing that stands out is how terribly
bad Windows performed with many small single
transactions and fsync=true.

Appearantly fsync on Windows is a very costly
operation.

Another (good) thing is that PG beats FB on all
other tests :-)


Bye, Chris.