Thanks for reminding me that 64bit translates to: recompile everything you
need!
I think this is exactly the choice of configuration we are going to make. Someone just reminded me that windows and linux come down to the same performance, but that the real overhead is on maintenance. It's true that linux implies less downtime, and you can always upgrade. On top of that, there's more granularity control on linux.
I won't say anything on linux vs windows performance (although I sure do have an opinion), but simply keep in mind that postgres on window is young and postgres on linux is vary mature ; therefore one is likely to have a lot more performance refinements than the other.
Also Linux is not that harder to administer (especially gentoo). After all, all you want is a DB server, you'll install few software. Not like if you needed 50 different apps.
In your case recompiling everything is also a bonus because you'll be sure that everything is 64-bit optimized down to the last driver.
I wonder how long your killer machine will take to compile the whole OS. And Postgres too... could you post that ?
If you are concerned about security, you can compile everything with the stack protector (Propolice SSP) enabled. It's extremely advisable. All the other options like grsec et al are nice but require careful thinking, propolice just needs to be activated. If you don't know what it is I'll post docs.
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