Dual-CPU slower then Single under HP?

Morning all ...

Have a client that is running an HP server, specs as follows:

> HP-UX 11.00 HP 9000 L-200, Dual CPU (400MHz - 64 bit),
> OS Disk: 9GB U2W-LVD SCSI, 10K rpm

They are trying to determine whether or not it will be able to
handle their environment, and we're trying to help them from the PgSQL
side of things ...

They've got one of the HP developers working side-by-side with
them, looking at the hardware itself, and they've found:

" Running two concurrent Psql/Postgres processes made things worse. They
are blocking each other on semaphores. Elapsed time went from 4m:30s to
6m:15s (100K inserts)."

The 4m:30s is running one process for 100K inserts ... with two
CPUs/processes, it increases the time to process by almost 40% ... ?

Does this make sense?

Looking at disk IO during the inserts, its pretty much dead ...
other then the occasional 'burst' to disk, the disks are quiet, so its all
getting tied up in CPU ...

Thoughts? Suggestions? Other things to investigate that I'm not
thinking of?

Marc G. Fournier ICQ#7615664 IRC Nick: Scrappy
Systems Administrator @ hub.org
primary: scrappy(at)hub(dot)org secondary: scrappy(at){freebsd|postgresql}.org