On Tue, 25 Apr 2006 14:14:35 -0400 Bill Moran <wmoran@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Does anyone in the PostgreSQL community have any experience with > large caches or dual-core pentiums that could make any > recommendations? Heh :) You're in the position I was in about a year ago - we "naturally" replaced our old Dell 2650 with £14k of Dell 6850 Quad Xeon with 8M cache, and TBH the performance is woeful :/ Having gone through Postgres consultancy, been through IBM 8-way POWER4 hardware, discovered a bit of a shortcoming in PG on N-way hardware (where N is large) [1] , I have been able to try out a dual-dual-core Opteron machine, and it flies. In fact, it flies so well that we ordered one that day. So, in short £3k's worth of dual-opteron beat the living daylights out of our Xeon monster. I can't praise the Opteron enough, and I've always been a firm Intel pedant - the HyperTransport stuff must really be doing wonders. I typically see 500ms searches on it instead of 1000-2000ms on the Xeon) As it stands, I've had to borrow this Opteron so much (and send live searches across the net to the remote box) because otherwise we simply don't have enough CPU power to run the website (!) Cheers, Gavin. [1] Simon Riggs + Tom Lane are currently involved in optimisation work for this - it turns out our extremely read-heavy load pattern reveals some buffer locking issues in PG.
