Thread: Very important choice

Very important choice

From
"Lago, Bruno Almeida do"
Date:

Hello my friends,

 

I'd like to know (based on your experience and technical details) which OS is recommended for running PostgreSQL keeping in mind 3 indicators:

 

1 - Performance (SO, Network and IO)

2 - SO Stability

3 - File System Integrity

 

Comparisons between Slackware, Gentoo and FreeBSD are welcome.

 

Which file system has the best performance and integrity: XFS (Linux) or UFS (FreeBSD)?

*I've read that UFS is not a journaling FS. Is this right? How much this difference affects performance and integrity?

 

I don't have experience with FreeBSD so I'd like to know if it is possible to run XFS on FreeBSD 5.3.

 

 

Thank you,

Bruno Almeida do Lago

Re: Very important choice

From
Richard Huxton
Date:
Lago, Bruno Almeida do wrote:
> Hello my friends,
>
> I'd like to know (based on your experience and technical details) which OS
> is recommended for running PostgreSQL keeping in mind 3 indicators:
>
> 1 - Performance (SO, Network and IO)
> 2 - SO Stability
> 3 - File System Integrity

The short answer is almost certainly whichever OS you are most familiar
with. If you have a problem, you don't want to be learning new details
about your OS while fixing it. That rules out FreeBSD for now.

What hardware you want to use will affect performance and choice of OS.
You'll need to decide what hardware you're looking to use.

As far as file-systems are concerned, ext3 seems to be the slowest, and
the general feeling seems to be that XFS is perhaps the fastest. In
terms of reliability, avoid cutting-edge releases of any file-system -
let others test them for you. One thing to consider is how long it takes
to recover from a crash - you can run PostgreSQL on ext2, but checking a
large disk can take hours after a crash. That's the real benefit of
journalling for PG - speed of recovery.

--
   Richard Huxton
   Archonet Ltd