Re: x86-64 and PostgreSQL

On Fri, Jan 17, 2003 at 11:29:25PM -0600, Ron Johnson wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Will there be any advantages to running Pg on a 64-bit CPU rather
> than 32-bit?

In my experience, not really.  We use SPARCs under Solaris 7 and,
now, 8.  We haven't found any terribly obvious advantages with the
system compiled as a 64 bit app, but we _did_ find problems with the
64 bit libraries combined with gcc.  As a result of that and
pressures to get working on some other things, we stopped testing
Postgres as a 64 bit app on Solaris.  We haven't done any work on
Solaris 8 with it, and that system is a little more mature in the
64-bit-support department, so when I have a chance do to more
investigation, I will.

> Also, would int8 then become a more "natural" default integer, rather
> than the int4 that all of us millions of i386, PPC & Sparc users use?

I think the problem with int8s in a lot of cases has more to do with
typer coercion.  So at least in systems < 7.4, I'm not sure you'll
see a big win, unless you make sure to cast everything correctly.

A

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