Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2005 23:07:47 -0500
From: "Jignesh K. Shah" <J.K.Shah@Sun.COM>
Subject: Re: What's the best hardver for PostgreSQL 8.1?
In-reply-to: <200512212209.50234.caseroj@comcast.net>
To: Juan Casero <caseroj@comcast.net>
Cc: pgsql-performance@postgresql.org
Message-id: <43AA2693.3080005@sun.com>
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Hi Juan,

Solaris 10 license is for free.. Infact I believe you do receive the 
media with Sun Fire V20z. If you want support then there are various 
"pay" plans depending on the level of support. If not your license 
allows you Right to Use anyway for free.

That said I haven't done much testing with 32/64 bit differences. 
However for long term purposes, 64-bit always seems to be the safe bet. 
As for your load performance, lot of it depends on your file system 
layout also.

Regards,
Jignesh


Juan Casero wrote:

>I just sent my boss an email asking him for a Sun v20z with dual 2.2 Ghz 
>opterons, 2 Gigs of RAM and RAID 1.  I would have liked a better server 
>capable of RAID but that seems to be out of his budget right now.  Ok so I 
>assume I get this Sun box.  Most likely I will go with Linux since it is a 
>fair bet he doesn't want to pay for the Solaris 10 x86 license.  Although I 
>kind of like the idea of using Solaris 10 x86 for this.   I will assume I 
>need to install the x64 kernel that comes with say Fedora Core 4.  Should I 
>run the Postgresql 8.x binaries in 32 bit mode or 64 bit mode?   My instinct 
>tells me 64 bit mode is most efficient for our database size about 20 gigs 
>right now but may grow to 100 gigs in a year or so.  I just finished loading 
>a 20 gig database on a dual 900 Mhz Ultrasparc III system with 2 gigs of ram 
>and about 768 megs of shared memory available for the posgresql server 
>running Solaris 10.  The load has smoked a P4 3.2 Ghz system I am using also 
>with 2 gigs of ram running postgresql 8.0.3.   I mean I started the sparc 
>load after the P4 load.  The sparc load has finished already rebuilding the 
>database from a pg_dump file but the P4 system is still going.  The p4 has 
>1.3 Gigs of shared memory allocated to postgresql.  How about them apples?
>
>
>Thanks,
>Juan
>
>On Wednesday 21 December 2005 18:57, William Yu wrote:
>  
>
>>Juan Casero wrote:
>>    
>>
>>>Can you elaborate on the reasons the opteron is better than the Xeon when
>>>it comes to disk io?   I have a PostgreSQL 7.4.8 box running a DSS.   One
>>>of our
>>>      
>>>
>>Opterons have 64-bit IOMMU -- Xeons don't. That means in 64-bit mode,
>>transfers to > 4GB, the OS must allocated the memory < 4GB, DMA to that
>>block and then the CPU must do extra work in copying the memory to >
>>4GB. Versus on the Opteron, it's done by the IO adaptor using DMA in the
>>background.
>>
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