Re: Interesting Benchmark Article

Greg Smith wrote:
> Howard Cole wrote:
>> Postgres comes out on top for most of the benchmarks against MySQL
>> and SQL Server, in fact in the authors original article he goes as
>> far as recommending using Postgres. More interestingly, the article
>> seems to indicate that W2K8 server is faster for postgres than Linux
>> in many of the scenarios.
> I wouldn't go that far.  The numbers are all really close for the
> PostgreSQL results, and his results don't deserve nearly as many
> significant digits as shown on his spreadsheet.  And the PHP
> implementation used has more impact on results in some cases than the
> OS change.  For all we know the entirety of the difference relates to,
> say, the quality of the PostgreSQL PHP driver on the two platforms.
> There's not enough data here to prove anything beyond "for this simple
> PHP test, PostgreSQL performs the same on Windows and Linux, MySQL
> matches the Linux results, and MySQL lags far behind any of those on
> Win Server 2008."  Which is, again, not necessarily a statement about
> MySQL performance vs. PostgreSQL performance at all--for all we know
> it's because the MySQL PHP driver is garbage.
>
Hey Greg, I did not write the benchmarks - the benchmarks are comparing
ASP.NET with PHP  and if I was using either then you would want to take
into account the drivers because they are all part of the same package
as far as developers care. Benchmarks are one-off comparissons and I do
not claim anything about the ones posted in the article other than they
are good press for Postgres -especially coming from a Microsoft employee
- especially since they provide some elusive benchmarks on SQL Server.

>> Note that the linux version they were comparing was Ubuntu - which I
>> know from personal experience has very poor default settings for
>> shared_buffers due to Ubuntu's operating system defaults. Perhaps if
>> theses parameters were altered postgres would get a clean sweep.
> The parameters are no better on a default Windows install.
>
The postgres wiki notes lead me to believe that the shared_buffers
settings are not as important on windows as Linux. I am not going to run
the tests to find out - I am accepting these results as in the light
they are given - Pro Postgres :)

Howard Cole
www.selestial.com