On 15 December 2010 14:13, Stephen Frost <sfrost@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > You're misreading poor Magnus. He didn't offer any 'justification' > regarding why there isn't a Win64 port. He simply was pointing out, for > those who assume every 'real' tool must be 64bit, that a 32bit PG is > still a very viable and useful tool. The reason there isn't a Win64 > port has everything to do with no one being interested enough to work on > it, *because* PG runs decently as a 32bit app. If you'd like to work on > it, or pay someone to, I'm sure you'd find many in the community who > would love to see it happen and might even be able to help. Actually, there is a 64-bit port for windows now. I don't think I misrepresented Magnus - the post suggested that the then-lack of a 64-bit windows port wasn't a pressing issue, and that various technical considerations *partially* justified there not being one at the time (the word size of binaries, and more importantly PG's architecture). It's an assessment that I agreed with. >> Perhaps it wasn't stressed too much, but >> certainly it was treated as a greater than negligible issue: > > Compared to the costs of PAE? The memory overhead is *well* worth it. > Let's try to keep this in context here. I wasn't making any comparison. Magnus's post didn't mention PAE, and had nothing to do with it, but I just thought I'd draw attention to where the idea probably originally came from. However, it's worth noting that PAE still limits each individual process to a 32-bit address space, so PG disproportionately benefits from it (at least for high-concurrency use cases, which are the use cases where PG excels generally). What Magnus said is supported (albeit sort of weakly) by this: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee418798(v=vs.85).aspx "When you compile applications as 64-bit, the calculations get more complicated. A 64-bit program uses 64-bit pointers, and its instructions are slightly larger, so the memory requirement is slightly increased. This can cause a slight drop in performance. On the other hand, having twice as many registers and having the ability to do 64-bit integer calculations in a single instruction will often more than compensate. The net result is that a 64-bit application might run slightly slower than the same application compiled as 32-bit, but it will often run slightly faster." -- Regards, Peter Geoghegan -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general
