Re: Compile Vs RPMs

adave@vantage.com ("Anjan Dave") writes:
> I would like to know whether there are any significant performance
> advantages of compiling (say, 7.4) on your platform (being RH7.3, 8,
> and 9.0, and Fedora especially) versus getting the relevant binaries
> (rpm) from the postgresql site? Hardware is Intel XEON (various
> speeds, upto 2.8GHz, single/dual/quad configuration).

Some Linux distribution makers make grand claims of such advantages,
but it is not evident that this is much better than superstition.

You are certainly NOT going to see GCC generating MMX code
automagically that would lead to PostgreSQL becoming 8 times faster.

Indeed, in database work, it is quite likely that you will find things
to be largely I/O bound, with CPU usage being a very much secondary
factor.

I did some relative benchmarking between compiling PostgreSQL on GCC
versus IBM's PPC compilers a while back; did not see differences that
could be _clearly_ discerned as separate from "observational noise."

You should expect find that adding RAM, or adding a better disk
controller would provide discernable differences in performance.  It
is much less clear that custom compiling will have any substantial
effect on I/O-bound processing.
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Christopher Browne
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