On Thu, 2 Feb 2006, Marcin Jessa wrote:

> What CPU's are you referring to and how many of them when you say
> performance is pretty much the same?
> Would that include SMP on 64-bit AMD on NetBSD?

Of course it always depends on the workload, but for the usual situation
of a server serving many different clients, the clients will be spread
out across the CPUs, with no client recieving more than 1 CPU's worth of
work. I can imagine slightly pathological cases where a single client
could benefit from having his query running across multiple CPUs, but I
don't think it's at all a common case.

> How well does it work today and how well would PostgreSQL work on a
> multi-processor NetBSD system?

Just fine on a multi-processor system. But don't bother unless you have
lots of clients all banging away at once.

> What more can be done to assure fast disk performance besides
> implementing RAID on fast drives?

You want to check out the documentation and mailing list archives on the
PostgreSQL site. This has been discussed extensively.

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson            <cjs@cynic.net>             +81 90 7737 2974
   The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism
   by those who have not got it.    --George Bernard Shaw