Performance

Looking for a little reasoning behind our performance difference on 2
different platforms. We have been running postgres on our sparcs, and
have come to rely on the dB quite heavily. We have dedicated a box to
doing nothing but our postgres work. Here is what we have:

Dual Sparc 167
512 MB RAM
Solaris 2.5.1

Performance seemed reasonable to us, until we ran the same database and
queries on the following machine:

Intel Celeron 333
128 MB RAM
Red Hat Linux 5.2

We have a passwd style database with 65,000 rows. We updated 20,000 of
them with a SQL update command, setting a single integer field to a
value. Both boxes where indexed the same, and had identical data. The
Sparc took near 10 minutes to complete, while the Intel took ~30
seconds. This is just one case, but many very similar tests had the
same results.

Now I love Linux, and the price compared to a Sparc makes it much
simpler to get one on line. However, I can't understand why the Sparc
would lag so far behind. We are starting Postgres the same on both
machines:

su - postgres -c "/usr/local/pgsql/bin/postmaster -B 256 -o -F -i -S"

We are looking at getting a dual 400 Intel Pentium II box with Red Hat
to migrate all of the Postgres work to. But in the meantime, is there a
way to optimize the performance on the Sparc? Thanks in advance.

-Jason Neumeier.