> 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
