Re: SELECT's take a long time compared to other DBMS

On Wed, 3 Sep 2003, Relaxin wrote:

> I have a table with 102,384 records in it, each record is 934 bytes.
>
> Using the follow select statement:
>   SELECT * from <table>
>
> PG Info: version 7.3.4 under cygwin on Windows 2000
> ODBC: version 7.3.100
>
> Machine: 500 Mhz/ 512MB RAM / IDE HDD
>
>
> Under PG:  Data is returned in 26 secs!!
> Under SQL Server:  Data is returned in 5 secs.
> Under SQLBase:     Data is returned in 6 secs.
> Under SAPDB:        Data is returned in 7 secs.

This is typical of postgresql under cygwin, it's much faster under a Unix
OS like Linux or BSD.  That said, you CAN do some things to help speed it
up, the biggest being tuning the shared_buffers to be something large
enough to hold a fair bit of data.  Set the shared_buffers to 1000,
restart, and see if things get better.

Running Postgresql in a unix emulation layer is guaranteed to make it
slow.  If you've got a spare P100 with 128 Meg of RAM you can throw redhat
9 or FreeBSD 4.7 on and run Postgresql on, it will likely outrun your
500MHZ cygwin box, and might even keep up with the other databases on that
machine as well.