You're a legend! That is exactly the answer I needed to hear from someone who actually knows the score. I am now powering on with Plan B: Postgres64 on Linux64.
After relentless searching I have become fairly convinced that a stable release of 64-bit postgres for Windows doesn't exist yet. (I welcome anyone to show me otherwise). Since I am committed to postgres (already written the code, it works just not quickly), I will have to change my OS.
However, if these performance limitations on Windows were apparent to me from the start, I probably would have chosen MS SQL Server over Postgres (less pain to get the gain). Perhaps this is an argument in favour of 64-bit Windows port to be added to this list:
http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/64bit_Windows_port
Thanks again for all your help.
Tom
On 2 June 2010 15:27, Stephen Frost <sfrost@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Tom,
> The impression I was getting from Magnus Hagander's blog was that a 32-bitEh, sure, the data will be cache'd in the Windows OS, so more data will
> version of Postgres could make use of >4Gb RAM when running on 64-bit
> Windows due to the way PG passes on the responsibility for caching onto the
> OS.. Is this definitely not the case then?
be in memory, but you're never going to be able to use more than 4G for
any actual *processing*, like sorting, doing hash joins, having data in
shared buffers (to avoid having to go back to the OS and doing a system
call to get the data from the OS's cache..).
Not only that, but the shared_buffers are in *every* backend, so while
you'll only use 512MB for shared_buffers total, each backend will only
have 3.5G (or so) of memory to do 'other stuff'.
On a box with 16GB that's doing alot of relatively small activities
(OLTP type stuff), PG will work "alright". On a box with 96G with
terrabytes of data where you want to do data warehousing kind of work,
running a 32bit version of PG is going to suck.
Thanks,
Stephen
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