Thread: Postgresql on Quad CPU machine

I'm running PostgreSQL 7.4 on a quad Xeon attached to a
beefy disk array.  However, I am begining to wonder if this is
a waste of CPU power.

I think I read somewhere that PostgreSQL is NOT multi-threaded.
But, will it be able to take advantage of multiple CPUs?  Will
I have to run separate postmaster instances to get the advantage?

I'm not running a high load on that machine yet, So I can't tell
if the load is being balanced across the CPUs.  I expect that as
some of the newly launched sites grow it will require more resources
but maybe some of you could share your results of this type of
deployment setup.

Dante

"D. Dante Lorenso" <dante@lorenso.com> writes:

> I'm running PostgreSQL 7.4 on a quad Xeon attached to a
> beefy disk array.  However, I am begining to wonder if this is
> a waste of CPU power.
>
> I think I read somewhere that PostgreSQL is NOT multi-threaded.
> But, will it be able to take advantage of multiple CPUs?  Will
> I have to run separate postmaster instances to get the advantage?

PG uses a separate backend process for each connection, so if you have
multiple simultaneous connections they will use different CPUs.
Single queries will not be split across CPUs.

-Doug