solaris slow

Hi


I have installed postgres 8.4.4 (libxml and plperl)on a Sun Microsystems sun4u Sun Fire 880 with:

- 4 700Mhz processors
- 8 Gb Ram
- System 9 operSolaris
- 64-bit sparcv9 Applications
- 32-bit sparc Applications
- SCSI-3. Discs do not have any arrangement

It was compiled with the sun-studio (flag-bit X05 and 32 bits ....) ... i follow the recommendations from:

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.4/static/installation-platform-notes.html # INSTALLATION-NOTES-SOLARIS

Also I have installed postgres (8.4.2) on a PC (Dell Optiplex 960) with the next characteristics:

- 3 Gb ram
- 1 processor of 3.2 Ghz Dual Core
- A hard SATAS
- 06/02/1928 Linux (gentoo)


We design  some performance tests (special for my application); this test was executed with pgbench:

  pgbench -c 5 -T 600 -n -U aeedc -f test.sql aeespc

The results was the next:

on pc :

    Thu July 29 15:50:02 CDT 2010
            transaction type: Custom query
            scaling factor: 1
            query mode: simple
            number of clients: 5
            duration: 120 s
            Actually number of Transactions processed: 159
            tps = 1.302670 (Including Establishing connections)
            tps = 1.302746 (excluding Establishing connections)
            Thu July 29 15:52:04 CDT 2010
          
      
on Solaris:

    Mon July 26 18:41:58 CDT 2010
            transaction type: Custom query
            scaling factor: 1
            query mode: simple
            number of clients: 5
            duration: 120 s
            Actually number of Transactions processed: 85
            tps = 0.668752 (Including Establishing connections)
            tps = 0.669172 (excluding Establishing connections)
            Mon July 26 18:44:05 CDT 2010
          
      

As observed, is much slower solaris.


I also see the difference in disk access. For example iostat throws in the pc (filter some columns)


device    r/s    w/s   rKB/s   wKB/s   await %util
sda       0.12   3.62  8.24    45.85   6.06  0.16
sda       0       2.2    0       126.4     0.64  0.08
sda       0       0.8    0          8        0       0
sda       0       1.6    0        31.2      0.12  0.02
sda       0       1.2    0          8.8      0.17  0.02
sda       0       1.8    0         36        0.11  0.02
sda       0       1       0          5.6      0.6    0.06

and on Solaris:

             r/s    w/s   kr/s    kw/s    wait   wsvc_t   asvc_t  %w   %b
c1t0d0    0.1    2.8   2.5     25.3    0.1    27.8      22.8       0     2
c1t0d0    0      4.8   0       36.8     0       0            5.8        0    3
c1t0d0    0     10.8   0       92.8    0       0            8           0    6
c1t0d0    0     12.2   0       97.6    1.2    99.8       77.6       5    7

it is also slower solaris ...

I made the following "tunnings" in solaris without managing to improve the performance:


http://blogs.sun.com/jkshah/entry/best_practices_with_postgresql_8

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-performance/2006-02/msg00190.php

http://vnull.pcnet.com.pl/dl/postgresql/pgsol_best_practices.pdf



My questions 

- are there another way to improve the performance of solaris? where can i
  read more?

- the PC (with linux) have better performance than SUN (solaris).... therefore
  never going to get better performance ... what do you think about it?






Greetings and thanks in advance.