Re: Postgres low end processing.

On Fri, 3 Oct 2003, Ron Johnson wrote:

> On Fri, 2003-10-03 at 12:52, Stef wrote:
> > On Fri, 03 Oct 2003 12:32:00 -0400
> > Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> >
> > => What exactly is failing? And what's the platform, anyway?
> >
> > Nothing is really failing atm, except the funds for better
> > hardware. JBOSS and some other servers need to be
> > run on these machines, along with linux, which will be
> > a minimal RH >= 7.2 with kernel 2.4.21
> > (Any better suggestions here?)
> >
> > In this case, whatever is the least amount of memory
> > postgres can run on, is what is needed. So this is still
> > a kind of feasibility study. Of course, it will still be thoroughly
> > tested, if it turns out to be possible. (Which I know it is, but not how)
>
> JBOSS, PostgreSQL & 2.4.21 all on a computer w/ 8MB RAM? A 486 or
> *very* low end Pentium?
>
> It'll thrash (in the literal sense) the page files. *No* work
> will get done.

I built a test server four years ago on a P100 with 64 Megs of RAM and it
was already a pretty slow / old box at that time.

Considering that those kind of beasts sell by the pound nowadays, I can't
imagine torturing yourself by using a 486 with 8 megs of ram. Even my
ancient 486DX50 Toshiba 4700 has 16 Megs of ram in it.

IF ons has to develop in such a low end environment you're much better
off either writing perl CGI or using PHP, which both use much less memory
than JBoss.

I don't think I'd try to run JBoss / Postgresql on anything less than 64
or 128 Meg of RAM. Even then you're probably looking at having a fair bit
of swapping going on.