Re: help tuning queries on large database

peter royal <peter(dot)royal(at)pobox(dot)com> writes:
> So, my question is, is there anything I can do to boost performance
> with what I've got, or am I in a position where the only 'fix' is
> more faster disks? I can't think of any schema/index changes that
> would help, since everything looks pretty optimal from the 'explain
> analyze' output. I'd like to get a 10x improvement when querying from
> the 'cold' state.

I don't think you have any hope of improving the "cold" state much.
The right way to think about this is not to be in the "cold" state.
Check your kernel parameters and make sure it's not set to limit
the amount of memory used for cache (I'm not actually sure if there
is such a limit on Linux, but there definitely is on some other Unixen).
Look around and see if you can reduce the memory used by processes,
or even better, offload non-database tasks to other machines.

Basically you need to get as much of the database as you can to stay
in disk cache.

regards, tom lane