RE: [GENERAL] advice on buying sun hardware to run postgres - Mailing list pgsql-general

While this message is a few days late, Linux does work on more than 2
processors.

I don't know the full details, but before the 2.2 series of kernels for
Linux was released, someone on the Linux-SMP list showed their boot
messages.

It was on a Sun (don't know which one) Sparc system with either 12, 20, or
22 processors (I don't remember how many -- search the archives if anyone is
really interested). While not a typical Linux installation and not Intel, it
did work with more than 4 processors.

I don't know how FreeBSD SMP compares to Linux. Linux SMP works quite nicely
on the systems I have running (dual PPro 200 with 256 meg RAM and IDE hard
drives). The IDE drives are definitely a bottleneck on large table queries.
I'm looking to move to SCSI.

As for the Intel vs. Sun SMP for this, Linux Postgres has worked very very
nicely for me so far. And performance has been pretty decent. I'm moving
more and move into the Postgres server. This server does both web and
postgres work for intranet applications. All of this on hardware that was
'retired' after desktops were upgraded. Bang for the buck, I can't argue
with the Linux/Intel combination. This would also seem to apply for FreeBSD,
even though I've never ran it and don't know anything about its
capabilities.

Gregory S. Youngblood
ext 2164
 
 


-----Original Message-----
From: Chris Bitmead [mailto:chris.bitmead@bigfoot.com]
Sent: Monday, April 26, 1999 4:47 AM
To: Bruce Momjian
Cc: eric@broken.net; pgsql-general@postgreSQL.org
Subject: Re: [GENERAL] advice on buying sun hardware to run postgres


Bruce Momjian wrote:
>
> >       I am going to buying a sun server to run postgres
> > on as a backend database server for a www site.  Does anyone
> > have suggestions on what to buy?  Does anyone have
> > advice on running postgres on solaris or suggestions not to?
> > My budget is 5k to 10k but i'm looking for a machine that
> > can scale cpus and memory.
>
> IDE is just plain slow on Unix.  Unix does much better with SCSI,
> especially when there are multiple disks.

Oh I don't know. If you've only got 1 or 2 disks you may find IDE
sufficient. (well it works nicely for me.)

> >       Does anyone think i could get just as much running postgres
> > on a dual pent III with linux or FreeBSD as i could on a sun > >
enterprise 250?

People have been commenting lately that postgres on Solaris is very slow
compared to Linux. Apparently certain file system operations on Solaris
is _slow_.

> Good question.  I know BSDI runs well on two cpu's, and I know FreeBSD
> and Linux use them too.  On intel platforms, you are not going to find
> many OS's that can handle _more_ than two cpu's,

I disagree. I think Linux 2.2 should be able to go to 4 CPUs no problem.
Linus's personal machine has 4. I heard that FreeBSD's SMP isn't very
advanced but I have no personal experience.