Re: Windows 64 bit

On Mittwoch, 19. März 2008 Campbell, Lance wrote:
> Would there be benefits in running PostgreSQL in a 32 bit mode on a
> 64 bit version of XP?   My thought is that the OS could access more
> of the memory for the caching of the files.  I come to this
> understanding because on my production Linux box, I don't allocate
> more than a 2 Gig to PostgreSQL.  I leave the rest of the memory
> available for the caching of disk files.  So even though PostgreSQL
> would be running in a 32 bit mode it seems like it would still run
> better on a 64 bit XP box compared to a 32 bit version.  This of
> course assumes that one does have a sizeable database.

If memory is not the problem (db < 2GB), then it depends on your
hardware if your specific application is faster with 32 or 64 bit.
Handling big data structures that are 64bit aligned on a 64 bit
optimized hardware can be slower on a 32bit postgresql, while a
database with "small int" only values might actually be faster on a
32bit db, because of more efficient caching.

Example: We run dbmail (http://www.dbmail.org), a postgresql based
e-mail server, with a several GB DB, storing e-mails, which is quite
big data in DB terms. 64bit is more efficient here.

mfg zmi
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