RE: Re: Fast Inserts and Hardware Questions

I'm a big fan of commodity hardware however I think that some of the newer
suns and alphas have a crossbar based memory compared to a bus which if for
db can be a big win. Also having the cache disabled can sometimes benefit
applications like dbs doing large queries.

--
Ian Willis

-----Original Message-----
From: Steve Wolfe [mailto:steve@iboats.com]
Sent: Thursday, 15 March 2001 12:21 PM
To: pgsql-general@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: [GENERAL] Re: Fast Inserts and Hardware Questions



> > > * Is there an architecture best suited for this.  Should I shell out
the
> > > extra cash for a 64 bit box over a 32bit one.  Quad Xeon or Quad
Alpha?
> > > Quad Alpha or Quad UltraSparc?
> >
> > Again heresay, but Sun's hardware has excellent I/O throughput and it's
> > difficult to get people to abandon it in favour of Intel once they've
> > tried it.
>
> What I was hoping to hear was something along the line of "An int8
> index?  Dear God!  You better be using a 64 bit machine!"  or  "The only
> way you will be able to handle a load like that will be with
> UltraSparc+Solaris!!" or "Some Alpha fan did tons of assembly level
> optimizations for the Alpha processors, they are the fastest!"  From the
> sounds of it what I need is lots of fast disks and to hell with the
> CPU.  I might as well get an Athlon and a Network Appliance.

     I have a Quad Xeon that I could do some testing for you, if you wanted.
I'm awfully lazy, though, so you'll have to send me a schema and some test
data. ; )  I can give it a run with a single process, or with multiple
simultaneous processes over the network.

steve

    Alphas may be terrific (amazing, actually) for floating-point work, but
for Postgres work, I'm not terribly impressed with them.  A Compaq rep let
us borrow a $25,000 dual-alpha for a week, and I pitted in in a severe
stress-test against our quad Xeon.  At the time, because of a lack of money
and an obscure bug, we had PII Xeon 400's in it, *without* the L2 cache -
talk about cutting the hamstrings.  The Compaq machine was only about 1.5
times faster than the Xeon.  Now that we have PIII Xeon700's in it (with the
cache working), the machine has probably run us about $12,000 (including
hardware RAID and the lot), and I'm sure that it would at least equal the
dual Alpha now.

steve



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