I've been beating on the Interix port for a couple of weeks now and I
must say I'm very impressed with it in terms of stability and
performance. I can't attest for wider capability outside my narrow
scope of use (like a web server environment or
internationalization/encoding issues), but so far, it just 'feels
right'.
Although the I/O is slightly slower than 'native' I/O code, certain
other features make up for that. A good example is the IPC
support...SFU postgres processes allocate almost 0 virtual memory for
each backend (all kept in physical), and IPC shared memory behaves
exactly as you would expect in a unix system. This allows better detail
management of the server's memory and prevents virtual memory thrashing
that plagues win32 server environments...
Another nice feature of the Interix port is that it allows things
normally impossible in windows like renaming an open file, which is one
of those things which require difficult workarounds in win32 API code.
So far, I feel that 7.4.1 running on Interix is suitable for a
production environment on a NT server if you can deal with no sync().
Of course, WAL and fsync()ed files behave as they normally would.
Also, I haven't figured out a way to set it up as a service yet, which
is a fairly major drawback, but I'm sure it's possible.
Merlin
