Some quick questions

I am using Postgres 8.4 with 10 partition tables. We'll call them
reports_00 through reports_09.

I have a field that is a BIGINT which is a 13 digit number that is the
epoch time, which is the constraint that the table is partitioned on.
(Between time x and y). All of the partitions hold 10 weeks of data.
The idea is that I would like to write a script that would truncate and
drop the oldest week's table (after 10 weeks), rename the oldest
remaining 9 tables, create a new table, with the current and future
epoch date in the constraint, and continue on my merry way.

Is there anything like this already in postgres? Secondly can it be
done without manual intervention? Can I do this in a function and have
it auto run at a certain "time" based on epoch? This is something that
I have never gotten into so this is new territory for me, so please
forgive me if I am asking any newbie questions here.

I've tweaked the server that I am testing postgres on. I'm basically
doing side by side comparisons with Oracle, trying to see if we can get
the same or close to Oracle's performance. I've read the Wiki article
on tuning the PostgreSQL server, and I believe that I have gotten it
close, but there is still a substantial gap. Say I have a machine with
a 4 core processor and 16GB of ram (across 4 sticks), can I tweak the
configuration to use all 4 cores and 1GB of ram from each physical
stick on the machine? This is running on a Fedora Core - 12 machine.
Is that an OS issue or is than a Postgres configuration question?

Any advice or guidance would be greatly appreciated.

--
Joshua Gooding