> Thanks for all the feedback. Unfortunately I didn't specify that this
> is running on a WinXP machine (the 3D renderer is an ActiveX plugin),
> and I don't even think "nice" is available. I've tried using the
> Windows Task Manager to set every postgres.exe process to a low
> priority, but that didn't make a difference.
Are you sure you're actually cpu limited? The windows schedules is actually
pretty good at down shifting like that. It sounds like you might be i/o bound
instead. Especially if you're on ide disks in this machine.
> Several people have mentioned having multiple processors; my current
> machine is a uni-processor machine, but I believe we could spec the
> actual runtime machine to have multiple processors/cores. I'm only
> running one query at a time; would that query be guaranteed to
> confine itself to a single processor/core?
Yes. Background processes can run on the other, like the background writer.
They normally don't use a lot of cpu. You can avoid that as well by setting the
cpu
affinity on pg_ctl or postmaster.
> In terms of performance, I don't think simply more power will do the
> trick; I've got an AMD 3200+, and even doubling the power/halving the
> stutter time won't be good enough.
Again, make sure cpu really is the problem.
/Magnus
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TIP 9: In versions below 8.0, the planner will ignore your desire to
choose an index scan if your joining column's datatypes do not
match
