In response to Michael Favia <michael@favias.org>:
Bill Moran wrote:
In response to Gerhard Killesreiter <gerhard@killesreiter.de>: My point is: a) Let me send you a tweaked postgresql.conf file and well find out whether the performance difference is simply a matter of untuned configuration and ... b) Let me have the query log after the test and I'll see if I can identify any queries that could be improved, then someone else can test to see if the improved queries are acceptable from the MySQL standpoint.
I think this misses the point of the experiment which was to see which ran faster out of the box without optimization, not which can be made to run faster (which is another useful experiment but much more complicated loads, read/write/update ratio, transactions, etc).
And my point is that "out of the box" performance is an oxymoron with PostgreSQL and isn't even worth testing. It's admittedly bad ... this is a known issue with PostgreSQL. If you shoot the horse again, all you do is waste bullets, it's already dead.
On the other hand i completely agree with your points above and realize that those individuals most concerned with performance should have or desire the knowledge to properly configure the database engine/server. Unfortunately this isn't a black box many people like to touch readily.
But there's more to it than that ... I want to _help_ improve this. I don't have a set up to test myself yet (hopefully after the first of the year, but I won't know until then) ... However, if someone is willing to feed me log output, I can help by identifying what is slow and methods that might speed it up. Frankly, I suspect this will help Drupal performance _overall_ on all database platforms.
I'm all for making things go faster i just think this test wasn't meant to prove database superiority or anything like that and that is what this seems to have morphed into.
That's the way most people read it and, quite frankly, I don't care. I'm interested in improving the performance of Drupal, the performance of PostgreSQL, and the performance of Drupal running on PostgreSQL. I can help with that, but trying to tune Drupal queries when PostgreSQL isn't tuned for the hardware it's running on is a recipe for wasted time. I'm not interested in proving that PostgreSQL is better than MySQL, I'm interested in _making_ PostgreSQL better than MySQL. To do that, I need data. Unfortunately, "PostgreSQL's default config performs poorly" isn't helpful data ;) -- Bill Moran http://www.potentialtech.com