Thread: performance of PostgreSQL on 64 bit MAC OS X G5!

Hi,

We have been running PostgreSQL 7.3.4 on 64 bit MAC OS X G5 dual
processors with 8GB of RAM  for a while.
Lately, we realized that consistently only about 4GB of RAM is used
even when CPUs have maxed out
for postgtres processes and pageouts starts to happen. Here is a
portion of the output from TOP:

MemRegions: num =  3761, resident = 41.5M + 7.61M private,  376M shared
PhysMem:   322M wired, 1.83G active, 1.41G inactive, 3.56G used, 4.44G
free
VM: 14.0G + 69.9M   277034(0) pageins, 1461(0) pageouts

Is it because PostgreSQL 7.3.4 can't take advantage of the 64 bit
hardware or is it something else?

Thanks a lot!

Qing

Oops! qzhao@supplyfx.com (Qing Zhao) was seen spray-painting on a wall:
> Is it because PostgreSQL 7.3.4 can't take advantage of the 64 bit
> hardware or is it something else?

PostgreSQL has been able to take advantage of 64 bit hardware WHEN THE
OS SUPPORTS IT, for quite a few versions now.

As far as I was aware, Mac OS-X was still deployed as a 32 bit
operating system.  Apple's advertising material seems deliberately
ambiguous in this regard; it seems to imply there is no difference
between 32- and 64-bit applications.  To wit:

  "... This means that 32-bit applications that run on Mac OS X today
  will run natively on 64-bit PowerPC G5 Processor-based Macintosh
  computers, without the need for recompiling or additional
  optimizations."

There are quite likely to be some additional "compiler incantations"
required in order to compile applications as 64 bit apps that will be
able to reference, internally, more than 4GB of RAM.
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