On Thu, Feb 02, 2006 at 12:06:35AM +0000, Marcin Jessa wrote:
> I was wondering if any of you have experience with PostgreSQL's performance on 
> NetBSD 3.0 or CURRENT compared to other open source O.S's. 

I can't tell you about the other Operating Systems, but at least two
facts. MySQL and Postgres have very different performance
characteristics. The former is optimised for Linux-like multithreading.
It sucks if you don't have native 1:1 or at least very efficient m:n
threading. Heck, it is highly dependent on the compiler optimisation as
shown by Intel ads.

Postgres on the other hand is using multi-programming (e.g. forking for
each database connection). It doesn't depend on threading in the server
at all, but needs proper IO implementations and VM performance. For many
years, BSDs have been the platform of choice for the developers.

I don't think you'll hit any big performance regression if at all,
compared to Linux. Two factors you should investigate carefully are the
number of SYSV shared memory pages (very low default limit) and the disk
queue algorithms for newer versions.

Joerg