Re:Things I wish I knew about MongoDB a year ago
by andyzweb on Thursday October 18, 2012 @08:13AM
(#4668385)
postgres does horrible with multicore unless you have many concurrent pooled connections. fork-and-forget
Re:Things I wish I knew about MongoDB a year ago
by jeffdavis on Thursday October 18, 2012 @10:37AM
(#4668940)
I think you're referring to postgres's inability to use more than one core per query, which is true (or mostly true... there are quite a few helper processes that take on some of the work).
For many smaller queries, postgres does great on multi-core, and pgbouncer is a good connection pooler.
I think that's an oversimplification. Two counterpoints:
* Database systems will always need to make heavy use of locality. The speed of light means that synchronizing access over long distances (even medium distances -- light only goes about a foot per nanosecond) will always be a challenge.
* Multi-core means vertical scaling is back in (if by "vertical scaling" you mean "scaling on one box"), and probably for a while.
Postgres is doing an excellent job at both.
I do agree with the less-exaggerated point that postgres really needs to improve its multi-machine scaling. But it's far from a solved problem on any system under discussion.