Re: New server to improve performance on our large and busy DB - advice? (v2)

[Dave Crooke <dcrooke@xxxxxxxxx>]

Just opinion, and like Greg, I was suggesting it along the lines of "it's the platform most production PG instances run on, so you're following a well trodden path, and any issue you encounter is likely to have been found and fixed by someone else". 

It's not about the general suitability of the OS as a database platform, or its feature set, it's about a combination of specific versions of OS, kernel, DB etc that are known to work reliably.


I am curious about the write barrier and shmem issues that other folks have alluded to ... I am pretty new to using PG, but I've used other databases on Linux in production (mostly Oracle, some MySQL) which also use these kernel resources and never encountered problems related to them even under very high loads.

I'd also like to know what OS'es the PG core folks like Tom use.

Cheers
Dave

On Fri, Jan 15, 2010 at 10:10 AM, Tony McC <afmcc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Thu, 14 Jan 2010 16:35:53 -0600
Dave Crooke <dcrooke@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> For any given database engine, regardless of the marketing and support
> stance, there is only one true "primary" enterprise OS platform that
> most big mission critical sites use, and is the best supported and
> most stable platform for that RDBMS. For Oracle, that's HP-UX (but 10
> years ago, it was Solaris). For PostgreSQL, it's Linux.

I am interested in this response and am wondering if this is just
Dave's opinion or some sort of official PostgreSQL policy.  I am
learning PostgreSQL by running it on FreeBSD 8.0-STABLE.  So far I
have found no problems and have even read a few posts that are critical
of Linux's handling of fsync.  I really don't want to start a Linux vs
FreeBSD flame war (I like Linux and use that too, though not for
database use), I am just intrigued by the claim that Linux is somehow
the natural OS for running PostgreSQL.  I think if Dave had said "for
PostgreSQL, it's a variant of Unix" I wouldn't have been puzzled.  So I
suppose the question is: what is it about Linux specifically (as
contrasted with other Unix-like OSes, especially Open Source ones) that
makes it particularly suitable for running PostgreSQL?

Best,
Tony

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