On Thu, 21 Aug 2008, André Volpato wrote:
So, what is slowing down is the CPU (Intel(R) Pentium(R) Dual CPU E2160 @ 1.80GHz)..In practice, I have noticed that dual 1.8 is worse than single 3.0. We have another server wich is a Pentium D 3.0 GHz, that runs faster.
Pentium D models are all dual-core so either you've got the wrong model number here or you've actually comparing against a 2X3.0GHz part.
The Core 2 Duo E2160 has a very small CPU cache--512KB per core. Your older Pentium system probably has quite a bit more. I suspect that's the main reason it runs faster on this application.
I am a bit confused about what CPU is best for Postgres. Our apps is mostly read, with a few connections and heavy queryes.
There are a lot of things you can run into with Postgres that end up being limited by the fact that they only run on a single core, as you've seen here. If you've only got a fairly small number of connections running CPU heavy queries, you probably want a processor with lots of L2 cache and a fast clock speed, rather than adding a large number of cores running at a slower speed. The very small L2 cache on your E2160 is likely what's holding it back here, and even though the newer processors are significantly more efficient per clock the gap between 1.8GHz and 3.0GHz is pretty big.
-- * Greg Smith gsmith@xxxxxxxxxxxxx http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD
