Postgresql minimum requirements

[nightowl]

I have a site which has about 10 000 queries a day to my database. That database is now hosted on a Pentium IV, 1600 Meg. Because of optimalisation of my budget, I would like to know if anybody thinks it would also run on a Pentium 100 ? Or would it become to slow then ?

[chriskl]

You might be pushing it with a pentium 100, although it will run happily. The major factor you need to look into is the amount of RAM you have available for postgres - processor speed is a secondary, yet still faily good, factor in performance.

Chris

[[deleted]]

Ofcourse it will "work" as in: "do it's tasks", but reducing your speed from a P4 (which is probably aboe 1GHz?) to a P-100 means you cut your speed by 90% at least.

The amount of RAM is important but, it can never make up for a 90% speed-cut in the CPU. (remember the P4 also has the memory advantage)

If your query takes 0.5 seconds on a P4, you should keep in mind that on a P100 it could take as much as 4-8 seconds, no matter how much ram you have.

[Sxooter]

The ability of a P100 to handle your load really depends on what those queries are doing.

If they are fairly simple selects with few updates and inserts, then yes, 10,000 queries a day is no big deal, but if they are complex, CPU intensive queries you could have issues.

What's the maximum load the P IV operates under during the day?

You can probably get by on an old PII-300 or something just fine, but going all the way down to a P100 may be a problem, as many machines of that class had chipsets (VX, TX, FX) that could only cache 64 or 128 Meg of ram. The HX chipset, much less common, could cache 512 Meg of ram, and with one of those machines you might be able to throw enough memory at the problem to make it work.

By the time the PIIs came along, the chipsets were caching at least 256 Meg of ram, and those machines have much faster memory busses and internal caches.

a PII-350 can be had for no more than a P100 really, since they're both obsolete by today's standards.

Better yet, find a Dual PPRo200. I've got one under my desk that was being traded out, and it's about 1/3 as fast as my 1.1GHz Celeron at running postgresql, easily a match for my old PII 300s, and seems to handle parallel load better being a dual processor box.