[postgis-users] Hardware requirements

[ValiSystem]

On 8 juin 07, at 12:25, Matt Doughty wrote:

> Thinking about the memory issue, do Postgres and PostGIS have
> recommended hardware requirements in terms of RAM, processor speed,  
> etc.
> etc. Obviously this would depend upon how big the tables to be  
> processed
> are and what type of operations are performed, but is there a general
> 'rule of thumb'?
>
> Cheers,
>
> Matt
>
>
>
> Matt Doughty
>
> GEOGRAMA S.L.
> Tel.:  +34 945 13 13 72    652 77 14 15
> Fax: +34 945 23 03 40
> www.geograma.com
>

Well, for simple operations on indexes (overlapping, inclusion, ...)  
and some test,calculations (Contains, Distance) in the same query on  
a 10000 more or less complex polygons table i have an average 120ms  
for query processing  for Mac OS X PPC 1.67GHz with one Gigabyte of  
ram. Same result on Linux with a 800Mhz C7 processor with 1GB ram.

Searching points in a little area  against a 100 000 points tables  
took around 300 ms on same hardware.(hum, i not sure, but i remember  
that 300ms were through a webservice call, so pure database query  
time might be the half time)

re-projecting and calculating sum of areas of 11000 polygons takes  
700ms on my PPC and les than 500ms on a 2Ghz C7.

Memory is not very important eiser if you don't care waiting up to  
few seconds for query result (typically for development or desktop  
use, not multiuser use) - a few megabytes of memory are enough for  
postgres/postgis, depending of the size of your database of course  
(70 000 polygons here).

My opinion is that as soon has you don't have to do full joins  
between two tables (eg having O(NxM) processing, N and M are the size  
of tables in rows with more than 5 000 elements to be really  
significative), or having to handle dozens of request per second, you  
really don't need huge hardware.

So for a small database (few hundreds of objects), desktop/ 
development use i would say that any hardware would fit (hum, don't  
try on your iPod, though). For multi user use, up to ten, without  
huge queries, i think that a little server (monocore, 1GB ram) would  
be enough.