Re: [PERFORM] Best OS for Postgres 8.2

2007-05-08 Thread Trygve Laugstøl

[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

On Tue, 8 May 2007, Claus Guttesen wrote:

  In #postgresql on freenode, somebody ever mentioned that ZFS from 
  Solaris
  helps a lot to the performance of pgsql, so dose anyone have 
information

  about that?

 the filesystem you use will affect the performance of postgres
 significantly. I've heard a lot of claims for ZFS, unfortunantly 
many of

 them from people who have prooven that they didn't know what they were
 talking about by the end of their first or second e-mails.

 much of the hype for ZFS is it's volume management capabilities and 
admin
 tools. Linux has most (if not all) of the volume management 
capabilities,
 it just seperates them from the filesystems so that any filesystem 
can use

 them, and as a result you use one tool to setup your RAID, one to setup
 snapshots, and a third to format your filesystems where ZFS does 
this in

 one userspace tool.


Even though those posters may have proven them selves wrong, zfs is
still a very handy fs and it should not be judged relative to these
statements.


I don't disagree with you, I'm just noteing that too many of the 'ZFS is 
great' posts need to be discounted as a result (the same thing goes for 
the 'reiserfs4 is great' posts)


 once you seperate the volume management piece out, the actual 
performance
 question is a lot harder to answer. there are a lot of people who 
say that
 it's far faster then the alternate filesystems on Solaris, but I 
haven't

 seen any good comparisons between it and Linux filesystems.


One could install pg on solaris 10 and format the data-area as ufs and
then as zfs and compare import- and query-times and other benchmarking
but comparing ufs/zfs to Linux-filesystems would also be a comparison
of those two os'es.


however, such a comparison is very legitimate, it doesn't really matter 
which filesystem is better if the OS that it's tied to limits it so much 
that the other one wins out with an inferior filesystem


currently ZFS is only available on Solaris, parts of it have been 
released under GPLv2, but it doesn't look like enough of it to be ported 
to Linux (enough was released for grub to be able to access it 
read-only, but not the full filesystem). there are also patent concerns 
that are preventing any porting to Linux.


This is not entirely correct. ZFS is only under the CDDL license and it 
has been ported to FreeBSD.


http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/2007-April/026922.html

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Trygve

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Re: [PERFORM] Best OS for Postgres 8.2

2007-05-08 Thread Trygve Laugstøl

[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

On Tue, 8 May 2007, Trygve Laugstøl wrote:

 currently ZFS is only available on Solaris, parts of it have been 
released
 under GPLv2, but it doesn't look like enough of it to be ported to 
Linux
 (enough was released for grub to be able to access it read-only, but 
not
 the full filesystem). there are also patent concerns that are 
preventing

 any porting to Linux.


This is not entirely correct. ZFS is only under the CDDL license and 
it has been ported to FreeBSD.


http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/2007-April/026922.html

I wonder how they handled the license issues? I thought that if you 
combined stuff that was BSD licensed with stuff with a more restrictive 
license the result was under the more restrictive license. thanks for 
the info.


The CDDL is not a restrictive license like GPL, it is based on the MIT 
license so it can be used with BSD stuff without problems. There are 
lots of discussion going on (read: flamewars) on the opensolaris lists 
about how it can/should it/will it be integrated into linux.



here's a link about the GPLv2 stuff for zfs

http://blogs.sun.com/darren/entry/zfs_under_gplv2_already_exists


That title is fairly misleading as it's only some read-only bits to be 
able to boot off ZFS with grub.


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Trygve

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