When using pre-built Postgres packages on modern ARM platforms, like the author of this post is, double check that the Postgres binaries are actually using the ARMv8.2 assembly instructions.<p>This can make a significant performance difference, and at least for the RPM-based official Postgres packages this is a problem: <a href="https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CACN56%2BP1astF5zvocrT7--Mu2dQWFS0eQ31xNmX%3Db%3D98y9fMSw%40mail.gmail.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CACN56%2BP1astF5zvocrT...</a>
> While ARM-based instance is 25 percent cheaper, it is able to show a 15-20% performance gain in most of the tests over the corresponding x86 based instances.<p>To put this into Workload per Dollar. Graviton 2 on AWS is roughly 50% to 60% cheaper. Now not every workload will benefits, there are many CPU intensive workload especially those benefits from SIMD won't work as well on current Graviton 2. But there are enough workloads especially those dealing with Web Stack has shown huge cost savings.<p>Hopefully this add perspective when people are thinking Intel's Server Platform is still relatively safe. I wrote something about it here [1].<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25808856" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25808856</a>
We are having a persistent issue on ARM RDS instances of postgresql.
They don't come up after a reboot. Each time, we had to file support tickets and get the customer support to fix it.<p>They said it was happening because of load, which is a falsehood, since I'm talking about a machine coming up after a reboot.<p>There is something broken on ARM on AWS there. And even after multiple tickets, they aren't able to fix it
Has anyone here made the jump? I'm considering testing some components or our infrastructure on Gravitron processors but going all the way in with the database sounds risky but I don't really have a technical data point to justify my bias.
The author makes it pretty clear this isn't a comparison of ARM vs. x86 but with the specs being nearly identical, I'm finding it very hard not to draw that conclusion. The difference is even larger when you factor in the cost difference.<p>Are there other factors that could explain the large performance gap?
Does anyone know if/when ARM is coming to GCP? Seems like a no-brainer for many use cases and our company would love to move, but we don't have the resources to manage multiple clouds for now.
With this sort of architecture switch for a database, would there be any reason to switch dev environments to use an ARM build of PSQL (where possible) as well to match production? PostgreSQL is often a core piece of apps that rely on it, but it sounds like this sort of change may be pretty much seamless from the application layer perspective.