Re: possible os recommendations

On Mon, 2005-05-23 at 14:02, David Bear wrote:
> wanting to avoid religious warfare, I'm curious if there may be some
> who would have recommendations for what operating system is 'best' to

SNIP

> I'm more concerned though about the complete experience, i.e.
> postgresql performance on Linux vs Bsd vs Windows...
> Maintainability.. Stability... os tweeks that were really needed to
> make pg work well, etc.

There's not a lot of difference between running postgresql on BSD versus
Linux for most people. As long as you or your sysadmin is reasonably
familiar with whichever you're running on, they should work fine. Some
folks choose to run PostgreSQL on commercial OSes like Solaris or AIX,
primarily for it's ability to support hot swappable and high
availability hardware. Generally speaking, a Very fast two CPU machine
running on AMD-64s with the latest and greatest FreeBSD or Linux kernel
is likely to outrun most of the big iron machines, they just don't
provide the 99.999 reliability.

The Windows port of PostgreSQL is just too new to be considered as an
equal to the unix or other ports. Plus, the things needed to make
PostgreSQL competitive on Windows aren't likely to show up any time
soon, since stability is the main focus of such a new port right now.

Your hardware and quality hardware drivers for your given OS are
probably just as important as the amount of memory and CPU speed you
throw at things. This is especially true of your RAID controller, it's
cache, and the number of hard drives you can throw at the problem.

Generally speaking, BSD handles lots of processes and file system I/O
better, while Linux handles CPU / memory intensive apps a little
better. But the difference is small to nil, depending.