Date: Mon, 19 Dec 2005 14:29:58 -0500
From: Jignesh Shah <J.K.Shah@Sun.COM>
Subject: Re: PostgreSQL and Ultrasparc T1
In-reply-to: <BFCC2E2D.16CBA%llonergan@greenplum.com>
To: Luke Lonergan <llonergan@greenplum.com>
Cc: Juan Casero <caseroj@comcast.net>, pgsql-performance@postgresql.org
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 <BFCC2E2D.16CBA%llonergan@greenplum.com>


Hi Luke,

I have gone to the max with 4 fibers on Sun Fire T2000. But I am not sure about the answers that you asked. Let me see if I can get answers for them. I am going to try to max out the IO on these systems with 8 fibers as soon as I get additional storage so stay tuned for that.

By the way you don't have to wait for my tests. Just get a trial server and try it on your own. If you don't like it return it.

https://www.sun.com/emrkt/trycoolthreads/contactme.html

Check out Jonathan's blog for more details http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan

However if you do try it with PostgreSQL, do let me know also with your experience. 

Regards,
Jignesh


----- Original Message -----
From: Luke Lonergan <llonergan@greenplum.com>
Date: Monday, December 19, 2005 12:31 pm
Subject: Re: [PERFORM] PostgreSQL and Ultrasparc T1
To: Jignesh Shah <J.K.Shah@Sun.COM>
Cc: Juan Casero <caseroj@comcast.net>, pgsql-performance@postgresql.org

> Jignesh,
> 
> 
> On 12/19/05 6:27 AM, "Jignesh K. Shah" <J.K.Shah@Sun.COM> wrote:
> 
> > Sun Fire T2000 has 3 PCI-E and 1PCI-X  slot free when shipped. Using
> > dual fiber channel 2G adapters you can get about 200MB x 8 = 
> 1600MB/sec> IO bandwidth. Plus when 4G HBAs are supported that will 
> double up. Now I
> > think generally that's good enough for 1TB raw data or 2-3 TB 
> Database> size. Of course typically the database size in PostgreSQL 
> space will be
> > in the 100-500GB range so a Sun Fire T2000 can be a good fit with 
> enough> area to grow at a very reasonable price.
> 
> The free PCI slots don't indicate the I/O speed of the machine, 
> otherwiseI'll just go back 4 years and use a Xeon machine.
> 
> Can you educate us a bit on the T-2000, like where can we find a 
> technicalpublication that can answer the following:
> 
> Are all of the PCI-E and PCI-X independent, mastering channels?  
> Are they
> connected via a crossbar or is it using the JBus?  Is the usable 
> memorybandwidth available to the HBAs and CPU double the 1,600MB/s, 
> or 3,200MB/s?
> 
> > Of course like someone mentioned if all you have is 1 connection 
> using> postgresql which cannot spawn helper processes/threads, this 
> will be
> > limited by the single thread performance which is about 1.2Ghz 
> compared> on Sun Fire T2000 to AMD64 (Sun Fire X4200) which pretty 
> much has
> > similar IO Bandwidth, same size chassis,  but the individual 
> AMD64 cores
> > runs at about 2.4Ghz (I believe) and max you can get is 4 cores  
> but you
> > also have to do a little trade off in terms of power consumption 
> in lei
> > of faster single thread performance. So Choices are available 
> with both
> > architecture. .However if you have a webserver driving a postgreSQL
> > backend, then UltraSPARC T1 might be a better option if you suddenly
> > wants to do 100s of db connections. The SunFire T2000 gives you 8 
> cores> with 32 threads in all running on the system.
> 
> So - OLTP / webserver, that makes sense.
> 
> - Luke
> 
> 
>