Ok that is beginning to become clear to me. Now I need to determine if this server is worth the investment for us. Maybe it is not a speed daemon but to be honest the licensing costs of an SMP aware RDBMS is outside our budget. When postgresql starts does it start up a super server process and then forks copies of itself to handle incoming requests? Or do I have to specify how many server processes should be started up? I figured maybe I can take advantage of the multiple cpu's on this system by starting up enough postgres server processes to handle large numbers of incoming connections. I have this server available for sixty days so I may as well explore the performance of postgresql on it. Thanks, Juan -----Original Message----- From: pgsql-performance-owner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:pgsql-performance-owner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Luke Lonergan Sent: Wednesday, April 05, 2006 5:37 PM To: Juan Casero (FL FLC); pgsql-performance@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: Re: [PERFORM] Sun Fire T2000 and PostgreSQL 8.1.3 Juan, On 4/5/06 1:54 PM, "Juan Casero (FL FLC)" <Juan.Casero@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > I am not sure about this. I mean I have postgresql 8.1.3 running on > my Windows XP P4 HT laptop that I use for testing my webapps. When I > hit this pgsql on this laptop with a large query I can see the load > spike up really high on both of my virtual processors. Whatever, > pgsql is doing it looks like both cpu's are being used indepently. The > usage curve is not identical on both of them that makes me think that > parts of the server are multithreaded. Admittedly I am not familiar > with the source code fo postgresql so I was hoping maybe one of the > developers who is could definitely answer this question. There's no part of the Postgres backend that is threaded or multi-processed. A reasonable explanation for your windows experience is that your web server or the psql client may be taking some CPU cycles while the backend is processing your query. Also, depending on how the CPU load is reported, if the OS is doing prefetching of I/O, it might show up as load. - Luke ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- 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
