On Sun, 25 Apr 1999, Eric Enockson 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?
Several posters have noted a particular slowness of solaris running on
SPARC architecture w/respect to postgres. But there are a lot of details
which are not known with respect to the observed slowness (could be OS,
could be disk drives, could be CPUs, could be cache etc...).
regarding IDE drives. an employee of mine has been talking about some
cheap high speed I/O storage solutions which are IDE based. 17G hard
drives running at only 5400rpm which outperform 10K rpm SCSI drives
because their areal density is so much higher. and they only cost $350 a
piece. however, the one drawback is that IDE is not well suited to RAIDs.
so what's your app. if you aren't RAIDing, why not go with high areal
density IDEs?
> cpus. enterprise 250 is in my budget of 10k but you certainly
> don't have to pay that much for multiple cpus on intel machines.
multiple CPUs are certainly way cheaper if you go the x86 route.
>
> 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?
likely. i am disappointed with general application performance on a
SPARCstation 10 (albeit much older box than E250). I love the stability
of the OS and its scalability with respect to networking functions. It
handles lots of users very well and serves the applications to those users
very well. It runs sendmail, apache and other network services without
ever so much as hiccuping. but SAS, postgres and netscape run like snails
on it.
just my $0.02.
steve
