Re: PostgreSQL on Linux PC vs MacOS X

>I noticed you ran PostgreSQL on a G4. What version of OS X were you
>running? Is it possible the issues you were facing were fixed with
>the newer G5 processor?

We were using OS X 10.2 in production.  We currently use 10.3 for our
development machines.

I would be shocked if a processor could fix stability issues in an
operating system.  As for performance, I cannot say how much better
PostgreSQL runs on a G5 as we don't have any G5s.  In terms of
hardware specs, a G4/1.25Ghz should blow away a P3/800.  But it
didn't for us, and I think that is because Linux/x86 is much more
efficient than OS X/ppc.  I do not expect that to change with a newer
ppc processor.

Since your your developers believe a dual G5 to be plenty, you will
probably get more than enough performance from an XServe G5 and any
comparable 2-way Intel or AMD x86 system.  PostgreSQL should handily
outperform 4D.  If those systems are in your price range, and
stability isn't a big concern, you should probably go with the OS you
are more familiar with.

- Jeff


>Jeff Bohmer wrote:
>
>>
>>We use PostgreSQL 7.x on both OS X and Linux.  We used to run OS X
>>in production, but due to numerous problems we switched to Linux.
>>OS X was not stable at all, especially under load.  It was also a
>>poor performer under load or not.
>>
>>In my tests, a P3/800, 512MB RAM (100MHz bus) was consistently
>>faster at all queries than a G4/1.25GHz, 1.5GB RAM (266MHz bus) for
>>our application.  Both machines had single IDE drives.
>>
>>Another thing to consider is that you can only get ATA drives with
>>Apple hardware.  SCSI is not available from Apple, and SCSI devices
>>have very poor support under OS X.  If a server with ATA drives
>>goes down at the wrong time, you can lose data.  This happened to
>>us with our production OS X server last year.  An extended power
>>outage ran out the UPS battery, the shutdown script did not stop
>>the server in time, and we had to restore from an earlier backup.
>>For details on why this can happen with ATA drives, see this thread:
>>
>><http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-general/2003-10/msg01343.php>
>>
>>Overall, PostgreSQL has been rock solid, very fast, and
>>headache-free on Linux.  A complete change from OS X.  Our main
>>production PostgreSQL server has been up for 234 days now.  In that
>>period, the only downtime for PostgreSQL has been for planned
>>upgrades.
>>
>>As a side note, we've also had major problems running
>>multi-threaded servers on OS X which run great (stable and much,
>>much faster) on Linux.
>>
>>- Jeff
>>
>>
>>>We currently are running a data intensive web service on a Mac
>>>using 4D. The developers of our site are looking at converting
>>>this web service to PostgreSQL. We will have a backup of our three
>>>production servers at our location. The developers are
>>>recommending that I purchase a 2GHz Dual Processor G5 with between
>>>2GB and 4 GB RAM. They say that this configuration would be able
>>>to easily run a copy of all three production servers. My question
>>>is: has anybody had any experience comparing the performance of
>>>PostgreSQL on a G5 Mac versus a PC running Linux? Can anyone tell
>>>me if there are any benefits of running PostgreSQL on one platform
>>>over the other. Anything that can help me make the best decision
>>>would be appreciated.
>>>
>>>--
>>>James Strickland - MCP
>>>IT Manager
>>>American Roamer
>>>901-377-8585
>>>http://www.americanroamer.com
>>>
>>>
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>>>
>>>               http://archives.postgresql.org

--

Jeff Bohmer
VisionLink, Inc.
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303.402.0170 x121
http://www.visionlink.org/
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