Thread: oracle linux
They seem to claim up to 70% speed gain. Did anyone proved it, tested it - with PostgreSQL in particular ? They seem to run the same way as RHEL do, ie - you can download it for free, but pay for repo access. (thus updates). -- GJ
On 28 Březen 2012, 16:38, Gregg Jaskiewicz wrote: > They seem to claim up to 70% speed gain. > Did anyone proved it, tested it - with PostgreSQL in particular ? They do claim a lot of things, and most of the time it's along the lines "Let's take this very specific case, let's assume these rather unusual facts, let's run the benchmark on a slightly different hardware. And then we'll choose the best of the results." I've noticed that claim too (actually they claim 75%) and I've been looking for the benchmark at http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/performance-scalability/index.html but no luck :-( I really don't expect such difference just due to switching to a different kernel. There's a space for infinite number of tweaks there (using a different default fs parameters, adding better support for the new Niagara T4 CPU not available to RedHat yet etc.). > They seem to run the same way as RHEL do, ie - you can download it for > free, but pay for repo access. (thus updates). Well, and they can change that any time they want ... Tomas
"Tomas Vondra" <tv@fuzzy.cz> writes:
> On 28 Březen 2012, 16:38, Gregg Jaskiewicz wrote:
>> They seem to claim up to 70% speed gain.
>> Did anyone proved it, tested it - with PostgreSQL in particular ?
> I really don't expect such difference just due to switching to a different
> kernel. There's a space for infinite number of tweaks there (using a
> different default fs parameters, adding better support for the new Niagara
> T4 CPU not available to RedHat yet etc.).
AFAIK, Oracle Linux is still just rebranded RHEL, with some very minimal
amount of additional engineering effort put in. It's not likely that
they are so much smarter than everybody else who works on Linux that
they can find huge across-the-board speedups that nobody else has found.
regards, tom lane
On 28 March 2012 16:30, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> "Tomas Vondra" <tv@fuzzy.cz> writes:
>> On 28 Březen 2012, 16:38, Gregg Jaskiewicz wrote:
>>> They seem to claim up to 70% speed gain.
>>> Did anyone proved it, tested it - with PostgreSQL in particular ?
>
>> I really don't expect such difference just due to switching to a different
>> kernel. There's a space for infinite number of tweaks there (using a
>> different default fs parameters, adding better support for the new Niagara
>> T4 CPU not available to RedHat yet etc.).
>
> AFAIK, Oracle Linux is still just rebranded RHEL, with some very minimal
> amount of additional engineering effort put in. It's not likely that
> they are so much smarter than everybody else who works on Linux that
> they can find huge across-the-board speedups that nobody else has found.
Reminds me of when Oracle claimed a 70x speed increase in MySQL
cluster ("Delivers up to 70x More Performance for Complex Queries"),
and the ability to process a billion queries per minute. Upon closer
inspection, the tables used in the "billion tables" benchmark were all
in-memory tables with no joins and distributed across 8 servers. And
the increases over the previous version weren't fair either because
the tests were using different hardware *and* one of them was
virtualised. They also didn't appear to want to disclose any further
details of the hardware differences.
So basically setting up unrealistic scenarios to get the highest
hype-making numbers, and ensuring the important context of those
numbers is in the footnotes somewhere.
--
Thom
On 28 Březen 2012, 17:44, Thom Brown wrote:
> On 28 March 2012 16:30, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
>> "Tomas Vondra" <tv@fuzzy.cz> writes:
>>> On 28 Březen 2012, 16:38, Gregg Jaskiewicz wrote:
>>>> They seem to claim up to 70% speed gain.
>>>> Did anyone proved it, tested it - with PostgreSQL in particular ?
>>
>>> I really don't expect such difference just due to switching to a
>>> different
>>> kernel. There's a space for infinite number of tweaks there (using a
>>> different default fs parameters, adding better support for the new
>>> Niagara
>>> T4 CPU not available to RedHat yet etc.).
>>
>> AFAIK, Oracle Linux is still just rebranded RHEL, with some very minimal
>> amount of additional engineering effort put in. It's not likely that
>> they are so much smarter than everybody else who works on Linux that
>> they can find huge across-the-board speedups that nobody else has found.
>
> Reminds me of when Oracle claimed a 70x speed increase in MySQL
> cluster ("Delivers up to 70x More Performance for Complex Queries"),
> and the ability to process a billion queries per minute. Upon closer
> inspection, the tables used in the "billion tables" benchmark were all
> in-memory tables with no joins and distributed across 8 servers. And
> the increases over the previous version weren't fair either because
> the tests were using different hardware *and* one of them was
> virtualised. They also didn't appear to want to disclose any further
> details of the hardware differences.
>
> So basically setting up unrealistic scenarios to get the highest
> hype-making numbers, and ensuring the important context of those
> numbers is in the footnotes somewhere.
Not to mention they actually prohibit independent benchmarking in their
license. They claim they do that to prevent "unfair" benchmarks executed
by people lacking the necessary knowledge, but considering the benchmarks
they publish ...
Tomas
On 03/28/2012 10:38 AM, Gregg Jaskiewicz wrote: > They seem to claim up to 70% speed gain. > Did anyone proved it, tested it - with PostgreSQL in particular ? RedHat's RHEL5 kernel is 2.6.18 with a bunch of backported features. Oracle just yanks that out and puts a closer to stock 2.6.32 based kernel in there instead. Basically the speed gain is for people who don't want to update their whole distribution, because of nonsense like "SAP etc. is only supported on RHEL5 based platforms" I think, but need the better high-speed hardware support of a newer kernel. Of course a several year newer kernel runs much faster on latest generation hardware. -- Greg Smith 2ndQuadrant US greg@2ndQuadrant.com Baltimore, MD PostgreSQL Training, Services, and 24x7 Support www.2ndQuadrant.com