Greg, > I am trying to squeeze every inch of performance out of my system - an > open source EMR for physician practices which uses PostgreSQL, JBoss, > Hibernate, RMI, and a rich Swing client on the front end.
Out of curiosity, what's the name of the EMR? > My question is whether there are *performance gains* to be had running > the backend on Solaris instead of say Linux or (cough) Windows. > > Perhaps the filesystem would be faster? Perhaps context switching, > thread management or something else? Well, there's no advantage to Windows. The contest is really between Linux and Solaris. Part of the question is what you mean by the word "performance"; on a strictly peak load basis RHEL is slightly faster than Solaris 10 on more workloads than ones where it's slower. However, from my perspective uptime is part of performance, because half an hour of downtime can hurt your business more than a week of 90% speed. In the user applications I've worked with, here's how it's broken down in the *general* case: Uptime: Solaris Filesystem/Heavy-IO OLTP databases: Linux SMP context-switching: Solaris Large DW: Solaris (ZFS) In-Memory Read-Mostly DBs: Tied A lot of it depends on your specific workload. Right now there's no clear advantage for most workloads in raw throughput, so it's worth looking at management & tools to decide which platform you like more. -- Josh Berkus PostgreSQL Lead Sun Microsystems San Francisco +1-415-375-8249 Ext. 69815
