It appears that PostgreSQL is two to three times slower than MySQL. For
example, some pages that have some 30,000 characters (when saved as
HTML) take 1 to 1 1/2 seconds with MySQL but 3 to 4 seconds with
PostgreSQL. I had read that the former was generally faster than the
latter, particularly for simple web applications but I was hoping that
Postgres' performance would not be that noticeably slower.
From my experience, the postgres libraries in PHP are a piece of crap,
and add a lot of overhead even from small queries.
For instance, a simple query like "SELECT * FROM table WHERE
primary_key_id=1234" can take the following time, on my laptop, with data
in the filesystem cache of course :
EXPLAIN ANALYZE <0.1 ms
python + psycopg 2 0.1 ms (damn fast)
php + mysql 0.3 ms
php + postgres 1-2 ms (damn slow)
So, if your pages are designed in The PHP Way (ie. a large number of
small queries), I might suggest using a language with a decent postgres
interface (python, among others), or rewriting your bunches of small
queries as Stored Procedures or Joins, which will provide large speedups.
Doing >50 queries on a page is always a bad idea, but it's tolerable in
php-mysql, not in php-postgres.
If it's only one large query, there is a problem, as postgres is usually
a lot smarter about query optimization.
If you use the usual mysql techniques (like, storing a page counter in a
row in a table, or storing sessions in a table) beware, these are no-nos
for postgres, these things should NOT be done with a database anyway, try
memcached for instance.
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TIP 6: explain analyze is your friend
