Re: [GENERAL] advice on buying sun hardware to run postgres

> I am going to buying a sun server to run postgres
> on as a backend database server for a www site. Does anyone
> have suggestions on what to buy? Does anyone have
> advice on running postgres on solaris or suggestions not to?
> My budget is 5k to 10k but i'm looking for a machine that
> can scale cpus and memory.

IDE is just plain slow on Unix. Unix does much better with SCSI,
especially when there are multiple disks.

> The sun enterprise 5 looks nice but absurdly comes
> with ide discs and doesn't seem to scale cpus. Seems i
> have to go with an enterprise 250 in order to get multiple
> cpus. enterprise 250 is in my budget of 10k but you certainly
> don't have to pay that much for multiple cpus on intel machines.
>
> Does anyone think i could get just as much running postgres
> on a dual pent III with linux or FreeBSD as i could on a sun enterprise
> 250?

Good question. I know BSDI runs well on two cpu's, and I know FreeBSD
and Linux use them too. On intel platforms, you are not going to find
many OS's that can handle _more_ than two cpu's, so the Sun may make
sense if you think you are going to need more than two cpus.

I know someone recently posted a comparison of Solaris and Linux, and
Solaris was half the speed, but I don't remember what versions/hardware
was involved. You can check the mailing list archives.

We have continued to speed up PostgreSQL to the point where many
operations are running at the native speed of the disk drive, so you may
find that the limiting factor is how fast data can be taken from the
disk.

Perhaps I should have an FAQ for this, but I am not sure how to address
it because the answers people want are not usually the same.

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