Greetings -
I am testing a Sun
Microsystems Sun Fire T2000 demo server at our company. I want to
know if anyone here has any experience with this hardware and postgresql
8.1.3. I installed the copy of postgresql 8.1.3 from blastwave.org onto
this demo box and loaded our production database into it. This box has a
single Ultrasparc T1 cpu with six execution piplelines that can each handle 4
threads. With the Unix top utility the postgresql server appears to bounce
around between the available threads on the system. For example I run a
single large query and I can see the postgresql server sometimes running on
cpu/0, other times on cpu/1, cpu/3,....etc up to cpu/23. However,
never is the load for the postgres server reported to be higher than
4.16%. I did the math and 4.16% x 24 threads = 98.84% cpu load. So I
wonder if the Solaris 10 kernel is somehow throttling the processes so that
any single virtual processor can do no more than 4.16% load. We got this
server last week and I was able to install it in our rack just
yesterday. Now I need to see how I can optimize the postgresql
server to work on this box. Does anyone have any suggestions?
I know the postgresql server is not smp aware but I believe parts of it
are. In particular the buffer manager is supposed to scale the performance
almost linearly with the number of cpu's (including virtual ones). I don't
know however, if I need to recompile the postgresql server myself to get those
benefits. I am using the version of postgresql 8.1.3 that is
available on blastwave.org. I am also working with the 64 bit version of
the database server. This machine has over 8GB of ram so I was
thinking of using the 64 bit version of the postgresql server so I can
access ram beyong the 4gb limit imposed by 32 bit addressing. Any help or
recommendations for performance tweaking of postgresql is very much
appreciated.
Thanks,
Juan
