Re: 7.4b1 vs 7.3.4 performance

On Tue, Aug 26, 2003 at 02:57:29PM -0600, Jacob Hanson wrote:

> This weekend I upgraded to 7.4b1 and ran my tests. There was
> significant improvements across the board. PostgreSQL's times went
> down some 25-50% for these things. And this is using a stock config (I
> know, I know, I'm going to fix it). (BTW, should changing config
> parameters show any improvements the tests I'm doing aren't causing it
> to swap? I know it's mandatory when I place it under load...)
>
> With 7.3.4, PostgreSQL generally fell midway between MySQL and
> Firebird. With 7.4b1, (I can't recall many specifics right now, but)
> some operations were actually faster that MySQL! Some operations were
> slower (inserting xxxxx records, I believe). But for the majority of
> my tests, PostgreSQL was neck-and-neck with MySQL. Very impressive.

Well, a possible explanation is that 7.4b1 uses a different "default
configuration".  The amount of memory it uses is actually determined at
install time (initdb time to be exact), so you will have a much more
reasonable default values than with previous versions.  It's very
possible that it affected your benchmark.  See how many shared_buffers
you got, for example (probably 1000 - it was 64 in previous versions
IIRC).

It's very nice to know that it actually performs within MySQL's numbers,
even for such a simple test.

--
Alvaro Herrera (<alvherre[a]dcc.uchile.cl>)
One man's impedance mismatch is another man's layer of abstraction.
(Lincoln Yeoh)