Re: Quad Xeon vs. Dual Itanium

scott.marlowe wrote:
> On Fri, 13 Feb 2004, Andrew Sullivan wrote:
>
> > On Mon, Feb 09, 2004 at 12:46:58PM -0500, Christopher Browne wrote:
> > > Lots of people have been running it on 64 bit systems for _years_ now.
> > > The Digital Alpha architecture, for instance, was introduced in the
> > > 1992, and Sun UltraSPARC in 1995.  PostgreSQL has been running well on
> > > these sorts of systems for a lot of years now.
> >
> > But actually, there are problems with using postgres as a 64 bit
> > application on Solaris.  It works, and it's reliable, but I've never
> > seen any evidence that it helps anything (and I've looked plenty).
>
> I wonder if this would hold true when running 64 bit linux on Sparc
> hardware...  Could well be that the reason 64 bit is no faster than 32 bit
> is that Solaris is just not a very fast platform for Postgresql, so any
> improvements running 64 bit pgsql are lost in the Solaris/Postgresql mix.

64-bits isn't faster than 32, and can be slower because of the longer
pointer length, decreasing cache performance.  The major advantage to
64-bits is accessing more the 4gb of RAM.

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