> Anecdotal responses are:
>
> Solaris is *bad* for PostgreSQL, due to a high per-process overhead.
> Universal opinion on this list has been that Solaris is optimized for
> multi-threaded applications, not multi-process applications, and postgres
> is
> the latter.
>
> *BSD has a *lot* of fans on the PGSQL lists, many of whom claim
> significantly
> better performance than Linux, mostly due to better filesystem I/O.
>
> Linux is used heavily by a lot of PostgreSQL users. I have yet to see
> anyone
> provide actual Linux vs. BSD statistics, though ... something we hope to
> do.
...
> --
> Josh Berkus
> Aglio Database Solutions
> San Francisco
Thanks for the reply. Three things come to mind:
About the list archives...
I read through the entire archive at
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-performance/ and didn't see much talk
on the subject. It only goes back 8 months though, so I don't know if there
is another archive that is more comprehensive...
Also,
I'm glad to hear your comments about Solaris, I'm really most comfortable
with Linux and I think I can pick up BSD pretty easily.
About the Intel platform though,
It's only been pretty recently (relatively speaking) that servers based on
IA32 architecture have had support for greater than 2GB of RAM. I've heard
talk about problems with applications that require more than 2GB. I do
believe that my tables will become larger than this, and the way I
understand it, sort mem works best when the tables can be loaded completely
in RAM.
I don't suspect that individual tables will be 2GB, but that the size of all
tables combined will be. If there is a limitation on the largest chunk of
RAM allocated to a program, will I have problems?
Finally, can someone suggest a *BSD to evaluate? FreeBSD 4.8? 5.0? Is Apple
a good choice? (I've heard it's based on BSD Unix)
Thanks,
--
Matthew Nuzum
www.bearfruit.org
cobalt@bearfruit.org
