Re: [PERFORM] [ADMIN] Benchmarking postgres on Solaris/Linux
Now if these vendors could somehow eliminate downtime due to human error we'd be talking *serious* reliablity. You mean making the OS smart enough to know when clearing the arp cache is a bonehead operation, or just making the hardware smart enough to realise that the keyswitch really shouldn't be turned while 40 people are logged in? (Either way, I agree this'd be an improvement. It'd sure make colocation a lot less painful.) Well I was joking really, but those are two very good examples! Yes, machines should require extra confirmation for operations like those. Hell, even a simple 'init 0' would be well served by a prompt that says There are currently 400 network sockets open, 50 remote users logged in, and 25 disk IOs per second. What's more, there's nobody logged in at the console to boot me up again afterwards - are you _sure_ you want to shut the machine down?. It's also crazy that there's no prompt after an 'rm -rf' (we could have 'rm -rf --iacceptfullresponsibility' for an unprompted version). Stuff like that would have saved me from a few embarrassments in the past for sure ;-) It drives me absolutely nuts every time I see a $staggeringly_expensive clustered server whose sysadmins are scared to do a failover test in case something goes wrong! Or which has worse uptime than my desktop PC because the cluster software's poorly set up or administered. Or which has both machines on the same circuit breaker. I could go on but it's depressing me. Favourite anecdote: A project manager friend of mine had a new 'lights out' datacenter to set up. The engineers, admins and operators swore blind that everything had been tested in every possible way, and that incredible uptime was guaranteed. 'So if I just pull this disk out everything will keep working?' he asked, and then pulled the disk out without waiting for an answer... Ever since he told me that story I've done exactly that with every piece of so-called 'redundant' hardware a vendor tries to flog me. Ask them to set it up, then just do nasty things to it without asking for permission. Less than half the gear makes it through that filter, and actually you can almost tell from the look on the technical sales rep's face as you reach for the drive/cable/card/whatever whether it will or won't. M ---(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
Re: [PERFORM] [ADMIN] Benchmarking postgres on Solaris/Linux
SS == Stalin Subbiah Subbiah writes: SS We are looking into Sun V210 (2 x 1 GHz cpu, 2 gig ram, 5.8Os) SS vs. Dell 1750 (2 x 2.4 GHz xeon, 2 gig ram, RH3.0). database will SS mostly be write intensive and disks will be on raid 10. Wondering SS if 64bit 1 GHz to 32bit 2.4 GHz make a big difference here. Spend all your money speeding up your disk system. If you're mostly writing (like my main app) then that's your bottleneck. I use a dell 2650 with external RAID 5 on 14 spindles. I didn't need that much disk space, but went for maxing out the number of spindles. RAID 5 was faster than RAID10 or RAID50 with this configuration for me. -- =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Vivek Khera, Ph.D.Khera Communications, Inc. Internet: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Rockville, MD +1-301-869-4449 x806 AIM: vivekkhera Y!: vivek_khera http://www.khera.org/~vivek/ ---(end of broadcast)--- TIP 4: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster
Re: [PERFORM] [ADMIN] Benchmarking postgres on Solaris/Linux
On Mon, Mar 22, 2004 at 04:05:45PM -0800, Subbiah, Stalin wrote: being the key performance booster for postgres. what is the preferred OS for postgres deployment if given an option between linux and solaris. As One thing this very much depends on is what you're trying to do. Suns have a reputation for greater reliability. While my own experience with Sun hardware has been rather shy of sterling, I _can_ say that it stands head and shoulders above a lot of the x86 gear you can get. If you're planning to use Solaris on x86, don't bother. Solaris is a slow, bloated pig compared to Linux, at least when it comes to managing the largish number of processes that Postgres requires. If pure speed is what you're after, I have found that 2-way, 32 bit Linux on P-IIIs compares very favourably to 4 way 64 bit Ultra SPARC IIs. A -- Andrew Sullivan | [EMAIL PROTECTED] The fact that technology doesn't work is no bar to success in the marketplace. --Philip Greenspun ---(end of broadcast)--- TIP 2: you can get off all lists at once with the unregister command (send unregister YourEmailAddressHere to [EMAIL PROTECTED])
Re: [PERFORM] [ADMIN] Benchmarking postgres on Solaris/Linux
We are looking into Sun V210 (2 x 1 GHz cpu, 2 gig ram, 5.8Os) vs. Dell 1750 (2 x 2.4 GHz xeon, 2 gig ram, RH3.0). database will mostly be write intensive and disks will be on raid 10. Wondering if 64bit 1 GHz to 32bit 2.4 GHz make a big difference here. Thanks! -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Andrew Sullivan Sent: Tuesday, March 23, 2004 9:37 AM To: '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' Subject: Re: [PERFORM] [ADMIN] Benchmarking postgres on Solaris/Linux On Mon, Mar 22, 2004 at 04:05:45PM -0800, Subbiah, Stalin wrote: being the key performance booster for postgres. what is the preferred OS for postgres deployment if given an option between linux and solaris. As One thing this very much depends on is what you're trying to do. Suns have a reputation for greater reliability. While my own experience with Sun hardware has been rather shy of sterling, I _can_ say that it stands head and shoulders above a lot of the x86 gear you can get. If you're planning to use Solaris on x86, don't bother. Solaris is a slow, bloated pig compared to Linux, at least when it comes to managing the largish number of processes that Postgres requires. If pure speed is what you're after, I have found that 2-way, 32 bit Linux on P-IIIs compares very favourably to 4 way 64 bit Ultra SPARC IIs. A -- Andrew Sullivan | [EMAIL PROTECTED] The fact that technology doesn't work is no bar to success in the marketplace. --Philip Greenspun ---(end of broadcast)--- TIP 2: you can get off all lists at once with the unregister command (send unregister YourEmailAddressHere to [EMAIL PROTECTED]) ---(end of broadcast)--- TIP 9: the planner will ignore your desire to choose an index scan if your joining column's datatypes do not match
Re: [PERFORM] [ADMIN] Benchmarking postgres on Solaris/Linux
What bus speeds? 533MHz on the 32-bit Intel will give you about 4.2Gbps of IO throughput... I think the Sun will be 150MHz, 64bit is 2.4Gbps of IO. Correct me if i am wrong. Thanks, Anjan -Original Message- From: Subbiah, Stalin [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tue 3/23/2004 1:40 PM To: 'Andrew Sullivan'; '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' Cc: Subject: Re: [PERFORM] [ADMIN] Benchmarking postgres on Solaris/Linux We are looking into Sun V210 (2 x 1 GHz cpu, 2 gig ram, 5.8Os) vs. Dell 1750 (2 x 2.4 GHz xeon, 2 gig ram, RH3.0). database will mostly be write intensive and disks will be on raid 10. Wondering if 64bit 1 GHz to 32bit 2.4 GHz make a big difference here. Thanks! -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Andrew Sullivan Sent: Tuesday, March 23, 2004 9:37 AM To: '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' Subject: Re: [PERFORM] [ADMIN] Benchmarking postgres on Solaris/Linux On Mon, Mar 22, 2004 at 04:05:45PM -0800, Subbiah, Stalin wrote: being the key performance booster for postgres. what is the preferred OS for postgres deployment if given an option between linux and solaris. As One thing this very much depends on is what you're trying to do. Suns have a reputation for greater reliability. While my own experience with Sun hardware has been rather shy of sterling, I _can_ say that it stands head and shoulders above a lot of the x86 gear you can get. If you're planning to use Solaris on x86, don't bother. Solaris is a slow, bloated pig compared to Linux, at least when it comes to managing the largish number of processes that Postgres requires. If pure speed is what you're after, I have found that 2-way, 32 bit Linux on P-IIIs compares very favourably to 4 way 64 bit Ultra SPARC IIs. A -- Andrew Sullivan | [EMAIL PROTECTED] The fact that technology doesn't work is no bar to success in the marketplace. --Philip Greenspun ---(end of broadcast)--- TIP 2: you can get off all lists at once with the unregister command (send unregister YourEmailAddressHere to [EMAIL PROTECTED]) ---(end of broadcast)--- TIP 9: the planner will ignore your desire to choose an index scan if your joining column's datatypes do not match ---(end of broadcast)--- TIP 4: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster
Re: [PERFORM] [ADMIN] Benchmarking postgres on Solaris/Linux
If it's going to be write intensive then the RAID controller will be the most important thing. A dual p3/500 with a write-back cache will smoke either of the boxes you mention using software RAID on write performance. As for the compute intensive side (complex joins sorts etc), the Dell will most likely beat the Sun by some distance, although what the Sun lacks in CPU power it may make up a bit in memory bandwidth/latency. Matt -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Subbiah, Stalin Sent: 23 March 2004 18:41 To: 'Andrew Sullivan'; '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' Subject: Re: [PERFORM] [ADMIN] Benchmarking postgres on Solaris/Linux We are looking into Sun V210 (2 x 1 GHz cpu, 2 gig ram, 5.8Os) vs. Dell 1750 (2 x 2.4 GHz xeon, 2 gig ram, RH3.0). database will mostly be write intensive and disks will be on raid 10. Wondering if 64bit 1 GHz to 32bit 2.4 GHz make a big difference here. Thanks! -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Andrew Sullivan Sent: Tuesday, March 23, 2004 9:37 AM To: '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' Subject: Re: [PERFORM] [ADMIN] Benchmarking postgres on Solaris/Linux On Mon, Mar 22, 2004 at 04:05:45PM -0800, Subbiah, Stalin wrote: being the key performance booster for postgres. what is the preferred OS for postgres deployment if given an option between linux and solaris. As One thing this very much depends on is what you're trying to do. Suns have a reputation for greater reliability. While my own experience with Sun hardware has been rather shy of sterling, I _can_ say that it stands head and shoulders above a lot of the x86 gear you can get. If you're planning to use Solaris on x86, don't bother. Solaris is a slow, bloated pig compared to Linux, at least when it comes to managing the largish number of processes that Postgres requires. If pure speed is what you're after, I have found that 2-way, 32 bit Linux on P-IIIs compares very favourably to 4 way 64 bit Ultra SPARC IIs. A -- Andrew Sullivan | [EMAIL PROTECTED] The fact that technology doesn't work is no bar to success in the marketplace. --Philip Greenspun ---(end of broadcast)--- TIP 2: you can get off all lists at once with the unregister command (send unregister YourEmailAddressHere to [EMAIL PROTECTED]) ---(end of broadcast)--- TIP 9: the planner will ignore your desire to choose an index scan if your joining column's datatypes do not match ---(end of broadcast)--- TIP 7: don't forget to increase your free space map settings
Re: [PERFORM] [ADMIN] Benchmarking postgres on Solaris/Linux
Matt, Stalin, As for the compute intensive side (complex joins sorts etc), the Dell will most likely beat the Sun by some distance, although what the Sun lacks in CPU power it may make up a bit in memory bandwidth/ latency. Personally, I've been unimpressed by Dell/Xeon; I think the Sun might do better than you think, comparitively.On all the Dell servers I've used so far, I've not seen performance that comes even close to the hardware specs. -- -Josh Berkus Aglio Database Solutions San Francisco ---(end of broadcast)--- TIP 6: Have you searched our list archives? http://archives.postgresql.org
Re: [PERFORM] [ADMIN] Benchmarking postgres on Solaris/Linux
On Tue, 23 Mar 2004, Josh Berkus wrote: Matt, Stalin, As for the compute intensive side (complex joins sorts etc), the Dell will most likely beat the Sun by some distance, although what the Sun lacks in CPU power it may make up a bit in memory bandwidth/ latency. Personally, I've been unimpressed by Dell/Xeon; I think the Sun might do better than you think, comparitively.On all the Dell servers I've used so far, I've not seen performance that comes even close to the hardware specs. We use a 2600 at work (dual 2.8GHz) with the LSI/Megaraid based battery backed caching controller, and it flies. Truly flies. It's not Dell that's so slow, it's the default adaptec RAID controller or IDE drives that are slow. Ours has 533 MHz memory bus, by the way. ---(end of broadcast)--- TIP 1: subscribe and unsubscribe commands go to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [PERFORM] [ADMIN] Benchmarking postgres on Solaris/Linux
As anyone done performance benchmark testing with solaris sparc/intel linux. I once read a post here, which had benchmarking test results for using different filesystem like xfs, ext3, ext2, ufs etc. i couldn't find that link anymore and google is failing on me, so anyone have the link handy. Thanks! -Original Message- From: Josh Berkus [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, March 23, 2004 12:13 PM To: Matt Clark; Subbiah, Stalin; 'Andrew Sullivan'; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [PERFORM] [ADMIN] Benchmarking postgres on Solaris/Linux Matt, Stalin, As for the compute intensive side (complex joins sorts etc), the Dell will most likely beat the Sun by some distance, although what the Sun lacks in CPU power it may make up a bit in memory bandwidth/ latency. Personally, I've been unimpressed by Dell/Xeon; I think the Sun might do better than you think, comparitively.On all the Dell servers I've used so far, I've not seen performance that comes even close to the hardware specs. -- -Josh Berkus Aglio Database Solutions San Francisco ---(end of broadcast)--- TIP 8: explain analyze is your friend
Re: [PERFORM] [ADMIN] Benchmarking postgres on Solaris/Linux
On Tue, Mar 23, 2004 at 08:53:42PM -, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: is way down the priority list compared with IO throughput, stability, manageability, support, etc etc. Indeed, if our Suns actually diabled the broken hardware when they died, fell over, and rebooted themselves, I'd certainly praise them to heaven. But I have to say that the really very good reporting of failing memory has saved me some headaches. environment, I'd take the Sun every day of the week, assuming that those compile option changes have sorted out the oddly slow PG performance at last. I seem to have hit a bad batch of Dell hardware recently, which makes me second this opinion. I should say, also, that my initial experience of AIX has been extremely good. I can't comment on the fun it might involve in the long haul, of course. A -- Andrew Sullivan | [EMAIL PROTECTED] This work was visionary and imaginative, and goes to show that visionary and imaginative work need not end up well. --Dennis Ritchie ---(end of broadcast)--- TIP 5: Have you checked our extensive FAQ? http://www.postgresql.org/docs/faqs/FAQ.html
Re: [PERFORM] [ADMIN] Benchmarking postgres on Solaris/Linux
Subbiah, Stalin wrote: As anyone done performance benchmark testing with solaris sparc/intel linux. I once read a post here, which had benchmarking test results for using different filesystem like xfs, ext3, ext2, ufs etc. i couldn't find that link anymore and google is failing on me, so anyone have the link handy. If you're talking about the work I did, it's here: http://www.potentialtech.com/wmoran/ (then follow the link) Anyway, that should be easily portable to any platform that will run Postgres, but I don't know how useful it is in comparing two different platforms. See the information in the document. It was intended only to test disk access speed, and attempts to flood the HDD system with database work to do. Thanks! -Original Message- From: Josh Berkus [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, March 23, 2004 12:13 PM To: Matt Clark; Subbiah, Stalin; 'Andrew Sullivan'; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [PERFORM] [ADMIN] Benchmarking postgres on Solaris/Linux Matt, Stalin, As for the compute intensive side (complex joins sorts etc), the Dell will most likely beat the Sun by some distance, although what the Sun lacks in CPU power it may make up a bit in memory bandwidth/ latency. Personally, I've been unimpressed by Dell/Xeon; I think the Sun might do better than you think, comparitively.On all the Dell servers I've used so far, I've not seen performance that comes even close to the hardware specs. -- Bill Moran Potential Technologies http://www.potentialtech.com ---(end of broadcast)--- TIP 8: explain analyze is your friend
Re: [PERFORM] [ADMIN] Benchmarking postgres on Solaris/Linux
Are you talking about http://www.potentialtech.com/wmoran/postgresql.php#conclusion - Original Message - From: Subbiah, Stalin [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Matt Clark [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Subbiah, Stalin [EMAIL PROTECTED]; 'Andrew Sullivan' [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, March 23, 2004 3:42 PM Subject: Re: [PERFORM] [ADMIN] Benchmarking postgres on Solaris/Linux As anyone done performance benchmark testing with solaris sparc/intel linux. I once read a post here, which had benchmarking test results for using different filesystem like xfs, ext3, ext2, ufs etc. i couldn't find that link anymore and google is failing on me, so anyone have the link handy. Thanks! -Original Message- From: Josh Berkus [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, March 23, 2004 12:13 PM To: Matt Clark; Subbiah, Stalin; 'Andrew Sullivan'; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [PERFORM] [ADMIN] Benchmarking postgres on Solaris/Linux Matt, Stalin, As for the compute intensive side (complex joins sorts etc), the Dell will most likely beat the Sun by some distance, although what the Sun lacks in CPU power it may make up a bit in memory bandwidth/ latency. Personally, I've been unimpressed by Dell/Xeon; I think the Sun might do better than you think, comparitively.On all the Dell servers I've used so far, I've not seen performance that comes even close to the hardware specs. -- -Josh Berkus Aglio Database Solutions San Francisco ---(end of broadcast)--- TIP 8: explain analyze is your friend ---(end of broadcast)--- TIP 2: you can get off all lists at once with the unregister command (send unregister YourEmailAddressHere to [EMAIL PROTECTED])
Re: [PERFORM] [ADMIN] Benchmarking postgres on Solaris/Linux
Yep. Thanks Bill. -Original Message- From: Bill Moran [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, March 23, 2004 2:10 PM To: Subbiah, Stalin Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [PERFORM] [ADMIN] Benchmarking postgres on Solaris/Linux Subbiah, Stalin wrote: As anyone done performance benchmark testing with solaris sparc/intel linux. I once read a post here, which had benchmarking test results for using different filesystem like xfs, ext3, ext2, ufs etc. i couldn't find that link anymore and google is failing on me, so anyone have the link handy. If you're talking about the work I did, it's here: http://www.potentialtech.com/wmoran/ (then follow the link) Anyway, that should be easily portable to any platform that will run Postgres, but I don't know how useful it is in comparing two different platforms. See the information in the document. It was intended only to test disk access speed, and attempts to flood the HDD system with database work to do. Thanks! -Original Message- From: Josh Berkus [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, March 23, 2004 12:13 PM To: Matt Clark; Subbiah, Stalin; 'Andrew Sullivan'; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [PERFORM] [ADMIN] Benchmarking postgres on Solaris/Linux Matt, Stalin, As for the compute intensive side (complex joins sorts etc), the Dell will most likely beat the Sun by some distance, although what the Sun lacks in CPU power it may make up a bit in memory bandwidth/ latency. Personally, I've been unimpressed by Dell/Xeon; I think the Sun might do better than you think, comparitively.On all the Dell servers I've used so far, I've not seen performance that comes even close to the hardware specs. -- Bill Moran Potential Technologies http://www.potentialtech.com ---(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
