Re: [GENERAL] advice on buying sun hardware to run postgres

Bruce Momjian wrote:
>
> >       I am going to buying a sun server to run postgres
> > on as a backend database server for a www site.  Does anyone
> > have suggestions on what to buy?  Does anyone have
> > advice on running postgres on solaris or suggestions not to?
> > My budget is 5k to 10k but i'm looking for a machine that
> > can scale cpus and memory.
>
> IDE is just plain slow on Unix.  Unix does much better with SCSI,
> especially when there are multiple disks.

Oh I don't know. If you've only got 1 or 2 disks you may find IDE
sufficient. (well it works nicely for me.)

> >       Does anyone think i could get just as much running postgres
> > on a dual pent III with linux or FreeBSD as i could on a sun > > enterprise 250?

People have been commenting lately that postgres on Solaris is very slow
compared to Linux. Apparently certain file system operations on Solaris
is _slow_.

> Good question.  I know BSDI runs well on two cpu's, and I know FreeBSD
> and Linux use them too.  On intel platforms, you are not going to find
> many OS's that can handle _more_ than two cpu's,

I disagree. I think Linux 2.2 should be able to go to 4 CPUs no problem.
Linus's personal machine has 4. I heard that FreeBSD's SMP isn't very
advanced but I have no personal experience.