Sparc seems very slow - Mailing list pgsql-general

Hello,

I´ve got a Sparc E250 server and I´m runing Debian GNU/Linux on it.
I now started to make some performance comparisons against a default PC.
Here are the configurations I used:

E250:
  ~> cat /proc/cpuinfo
  cpu             : TI UltraSparc II  (BlackBird)
  fpu             : UltraSparc II integrated FPU
  promlib         : Version 3 Revision 16
  prom            : 3.16.1
  type            : sun4u
  ncpus probed    : 2
  ncpus active    : 2
  Cpu0Bogo        : 799.53
  Cpu1Bogo        : 799.53
  MMU Type        : Spitfire
  State:
  CPU0:           online
  CPU1:           online

  2 GB RAM
  4x36 GB SCSI

  ~> uname -a
  Linux bse 2.2.18pre21 #1 SMP Tue Dec 19 22:53:19 CET 2000 sparc64 unknown

  ~> dpkg --status postgresql
  Package: postgresql
  Maintainer: Oliver Elphick <Oliver.Elphick@lfix.co.uk>
  Version: 7.1.2-4


PC:
  ~> cat /proc/cpuinfo
  processor       : 0
  vendor_id       : GenuineIntel
  cpu family      : 6
  model           : 8
  model name      : Pentium III (Coppermine)
  stepping        : 6
  cpu MHz         : 795.576
  cache size      : 256 KB
  fpu             : yes
  fpu_exception   : yes
  cpuid level     : 2
  wp              : yes
  flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 mmx fxsr sse
  bogomips        : 1589.24

  256 MB RAM
  20 GB IDE

  ~> uname -a
  Linux wr-linux02 2.4.5 #1 Mit Mai 30 08:24:06 CEST 2001 i686 unknown

  ~> dpkg --status postgresql
  Package: postgresql
  Maintainer: Oliver Elphick <Oliver.Elphick@lfix.co.uk>
  Version: 7.1.2-1

At first I created a set of tables and indexes using

   ~> date; cat ifsg.pgsql | psql ifsg; date

where
   ~> grep "CREATE *TABLE" ifsg.pgsql | wc -l
     40
   ~> grep "CREATE *INDEX" ifsg.pgsql | wc -l
    117

E250:
  Fre Aug 17 13:40:03 CEST 2001
  Fre Aug 17 13:40:14 CEST 2001

PC:
  Don Aug 16 14:15:24 CEST 2001
  Don Aug 16 14:15:28 CEST 2001

so the PC is about more 2 times faster. (By the way postgresql 7.0.2 took
24 seconds on this machine for this job.)
Next I started inserting some amount of data:

  ~> ls -l T000001_010000.TXT
  -rw-r--r--    1 tillea   admin    19196240 15. Aug 13:42 T000001_010000.TXT
  ~>  grep -i "INSERT" T000001_010000.TXT |  wc -l
  63481
  ~>  date; cat T000001_010000.TXT | psql ifsg; date

E250:
  Fre Aug 17 13:41:42 CEST 2001
  Fre Aug 17 13:57:52 CEST 2001
(version 7.0.2 took 1 hour for this task)

PC:
  Don Aug 16 15:23:34 CEST 2001
  Don Aug 16 15:24:51 CEST 2001

The question is:  Is there any reason for the fact that the PC is nearly ten
times faster for the same task?  By the way, I´m using identical
/etc/postgresql/pg_hba.conf and /etc/postgresql/postgresql.conf for both
boxes.

The only difference I can see are different Linux kernel versions (perhaps
2.4 series has better drivers to speed up disk access) but I wanted to
stay tuned before upgrading to 2.4 for production machines.  Has anybody
experiences using Solaris in a comparable machine?

Kind regards

          Andreas.