Re: Solaris

On Fri, 25 Apr 2003, Mark Kirkwood wrote:

> Shridhar Daithankar wrote:
>
> >Just one real advice, from what I have heard on lists. If the sun machine
> >supports, install linux rather than solaris. Apparently linux on sparc is far
> >faster than solaris, at least at lower to middle end.
> >
> Any idea how much faster (and in what areas)?

My general experience from a year ago was that Linux was about 2 to 3
times faster on older 32 bit sparc hardware than Solaris, and just under 2
times as fast on 64 bit hardware.  This is with one CPU.  I'd expect a 64
CPU E10k to run postgresql faster running Solaris rather than Linux, but
until I can come up with a spare $24k to buy a used one on Ebay I won't
know. :-)

> >Besides postgresql and
> >solaris have had performance issues in past.
> >
> >
> I believe this is all *sorted* now :-) The issue was the qsort library
> bundled with Solaris - Postgresql now supplies its own. So Solaris is ok
> for Postgresql (I think quite a few folk actually use this combination).

Mostly.  The issue in the past was mainly that Solaris had a brain damaged
sort() call that was very slow when it had a lot of duplicate keys.  That
has since been updated by Sun.

However, Solaris' heavy process / light thread design is probably sub
optimal for Postgresql in an environment where you are forking the server
all the time.  If you have pooled connections, then Solaris should do
fine.  I'd love to get ahold of an older SMP Sparc box and test the two
against each other.