Re: Freebsd vs linux and hardware question

Dror,

Howdy! Long time, no hear.

> Any opinions on the advantages/disadvantages of running postgres on
> Linux vs running it on freebsd?

Several prominent members of the PostgreSQL community claim better performance
on BSD due to BSD's better I/O stack, plus the history of Ingres filesystem
optimization on BSD. However, nobody has published figures.

> Also, under either OS would a dual processor machine run faster than a
> single processor one. For the most part, I know that databases are IO
> bound rather than CPU, bound so more memory and more and faster disks
> are a main issue. Still, it seems like being able to use multiple cpus
> could improve performance.

Not sure about BSD, but on Linux I know that Postgres will happily use up to 4
CPUs for simultaneos seperate requests. This doesn't help with modular large
queries/procedures, but does help a lot for concurrent users.
>
> Finally, is SCSI still such a big improvement over modern IDE drives?

Yes. ;-)

But hey, why are you asking this stuff? Don't you run Zapatec's stuff off a
huge SAN?

--
-Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco