from a posting in 2010 : 

Improved Query Performance for Large Integers and Serial Data

"The BIGINT and BIGSERIAL data types, which are provided as alternatives to the INT8 and SERIAL8 data types. can provide better performance than the INT8 and SERIAL8 data types."

https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/blogs/jacquesroy/entry/let_s_forget_int83?lang=en


I do not see any  more info on the relative "better performance" in relation to the other INT data types. Has anyone seen better performance out of these BIG data types versus the older types?

thanks