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From: Michael Stone <mstone+postgres@mathom.us>
To: pgsql-performance@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: New to PostgreSQL, performance considerations
Date: Mon, 11 Dec 2006 12:31:08 -0500
Message-ID: <20061211173105.GH16692@mathom.us> (raw)
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On Mon, Dec 11, 2006 at 12:15:51PM -0500, Ron wrote:
>I'd say the fairest attitude is to do everything we can to support 
>having the proper experiments done w/o presuming the results.

Who's presuming results?[1] It is fair to say that making extraordinary 
claims without any evidence should be discouraged. It's also fair to say 
that if there are specific things that need cpu-specific tuning they'll 
be fairly limited critical areas (e.g., locks) which would probably be 
better implemented with a hand-tuned code and runtime cpu detection than 
by magical mystical compiler invocations.

Mike Stone

[1] I will say that I have never seen a realistic benchmark of general 
code where the compiler flags made a statistically significant 
difference in the runtime. There are some particularly cpu-intensive 
codes, like some science simulations or encoding routines where they 
matter, but that's not the norm--and many of those algorithms already 
have hand-tuned versions which will outperform autogenerated code. You'd 
think that with all the talk that the users of certain OS's generate 
about CFLAG settings, there'd be some well-published numbers backing up 
the hype. At any rate if there were numbers to back the claim then I 
think they could certainly be considered without prejudice.



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