Re: best OS and HW for postgreSQL

On Sun, 2006-09-24 at 20:18 -0400, Jim Nasby wrote:
> On Sep 22, 2006, at 6:12 PM, Raul Retamozo wrote:
> > Hi everyone on the list. I want to know what is the reccommended OS
> > to work with PostgreSQL , on specific with PostGIS:
> > One more question is about what HW (server) offers the best
> > performance for a Web Map Server bases on PostGIS and mapserver.
>
> In general, you're probably best off running whatever OS you're most
> comfortable with.

I'd amend that to say whatever flavor of unix you're most comfortable
with. Many tools aren't quite there on the windows version, and it
still seems to have more issues with performance and scaling than the
unix flavors of PostgreSQL.

> As for hardware, until recently, AMD was the un-disputed king when it
> came to running PostgreSQL (and databases in general). But the newer
> Intel CPUs seem to have surpassed the Opteron. I believe there's a
> tweakers.net article floating around that did some performance
> testing with the new CPUs.

I think AMD still has an advantage for CPU >=4 due to the hypertransport
(not cores, actual CPU sockets >=4) Since most loads are easily handled
by two dual core CPUs nowadays, AMD and Intel are about even.

Much more important is your disk subsystem. Using an Areca RAID
controller with battery backed cache and a half dozen or more hard
drives is often the real winner for performance.