Re: Sun vs. Mac

On Tue, Jan 14, 2003 at 07:00:08AM -0800, 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

You should tell us about what version of Solaris you're running, what
version of Postgres, and what options you have used.  Did you split
the WAL onto its own filesystem?  You'll get a big win that way.
Also, what fsync setting are you using (open_datasync is the fastest
in my experience).  Finally, the bottleneck on Solaris is both disk
and process forking (fork() is notoriously slow on Solaris).

Also, certain sort routines are abysmal.  Replace the
Solaris-provided qsort().

I have to say, however, that my experience indicates that Solaris is
slower that the competition for Postgres.  It still shouldn't be that
bad.

A
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