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
---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 6: Have you searched our list archives?
http://archives.postgresql.org
--
Jeff Bohmer VisionLink, Inc. _________________________________ 303.402.0170 x121 http://www.visionlink.org/ _________________________________ People. Tools. Change. Community.
---------------------------(end of broadcast)---------------------------
TIP 3: if posting/reading through Usenet, please send an appropriate
subscribe-nomail command to [EMAIL PROTECTED] so that your
message can get through to the mailing list cleanly
