On Tue, 2 Mar 2004, Anjan Dave wrote:
> That was part of my original question - whether it makes sense to go for
> a mid-range SunFire machine (64bit HW, 64bit OS), which is scalable to
> high amounts of memory, and shouldn't have any issues addressing it all.
> I've had that kind of setup once temporarily on a V480 (quad UltraSparc,
> 16GB RAM) machine, and it did well in production use. Without having the
> time/resources to do extensive testing, I am not sure if
> Postgres/Solaris9 is really suggested by the community for
> high-performance, as opposed to a XEON/Linux setup. Storage being a
> separate discussion.
Some folks on the list have experience with Postgresql on Solaris, and
they generally say they use Solaris not for performance reasons, but for
reliability reasons. I.e. the bigger Sun hardware is fault tolerant.
For speed, the X86 32 and 64 bit architectures seem to be noticeable
faster than Sparc. However, running Linux or BSD on Sparc make them
pretty fast too, but you lose the fault tolerant support for things like
hot swappable CPUs or memory.