When did we get to be so fast?

I was just testing the threaded ecpg, and ran some performance tests.

Without using threads, I am seeing 100,000 inserts of a single word into
a simple table take 12 seconds:
CREATE TABLE test_thread(message TEXT);

giving me 8333 inserts per second.  That seems very high.

I remember testing on older hardware and seeing around 60 inserts per
second.  Have we improved our performance that much, or is it the
hardware improving over the years.

My hardware list listed on my homepage, shown below.

This is with 7.4, default everything.

--  Bruce Momjian                        |  http://candle.pha.pa.us pgman@candle.pha.pa.us               |  (610)
359-1001+  If your life is a hard drive,     |  13 Roberts Road +  Christ can be your backup.        |  Newtown Square,
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