Date: Tue, 13 Jun 2006 17:45:23 -0500
From: "Jim C. Nasby" <jnasby@pervasive.com>
To: John Vincent <pgsql-performance@lusis.org>
Cc: pgsql-performance@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: scaling up postgres
Message-ID: <20060613224523.GL34196@pervasive.com>
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On Tue, Jun 13, 2006 at 06:21:21PM -0400, John Vincent wrote:
> On 6/13/06, Jim C. Nasby <jnasby@pervasive.com> wrote:
> >
> >On Tue, Jun 13, 2006 at 05:40:58PM -0400, John Vincent wrote:
> >> Maybe from a postgresql perspective the cpus may be useless but the
> >memory
> >> on the pSeries can't be beat. We've been looking at running our
> >warehouse
> >> (PGSQL) in a LoP lpar but I wasn't able to find a LoP build of 8.1.
> >
> >Probably just because not many people have access to that kind of
> >hardware. Have you tried building on Linux on Power?
> 
> 
> Actually it's on my radar. I was looking for a precompiled build first (we
> actually checked the Pervasive and Bizgres sites first since we're
> considering a support contract) before going the self-compiled route. When I
> didn't see a pre-compiled build available, I started looking at the
> developer archives and got a little worried that I wouldn't want to base my
> job on a self-built Postgres on a fairly new (I'd consider Power 5 fairly
> new) platform.
 
Well, pre-compiled isn't going to make much of a difference
stability-wise. What you will run into is that very few people are
running PostgreSQL on your hardware, so it's possible you'd run into
some odd corner cases. I think it's pretty unlikely you'd lose data, but
you could end up with performance-related issues.

If you can, it'd be great to do some testing on that hardware to see if
you can break PostgreSQL.

> This is true. In our case I couldn't get the approval for the new hardware
> since we had two x445 boxes sitting there doing nothing (I wanted them for
> our VMware environment personally). Another sticking point is finding a
> vendor that will provide a hardware support contract similar to what we have
> with our existing IBM hardware (24x7x4). Since IBM has f-all for Opteron
> based systems and we've sworn off Dell, I was pretty limited. HP was able to
> get in on a pilot program and we're considering them now for future hardware
> purchases but beyond Dell/IBM/HP, there's not much else that can provide the
> kind of hardware support turn-around we need.
 
What about Sun?

> >We've been thrilled with the performance of our DB2 systems that run on
> >> AIX/Power 5 but since the DB2 instance memory is limited to 18GB, we've
> >got
> >> two 86GB p570s sitting there being under utilized.

BTW, in a past life we moved a DB2 database off of Xeons and onto
RS/6000s with Power4. The difference was astounding.
-- 
Jim C. Nasby, Sr. Engineering Consultant      jnasby@pervasive.com
Pervasive Software      http://pervasive.com    work: 512-231-6117
vcard: http://jim.nasby.net/pervasive.vcf       cell: 512-569-9461