Re: Configuration for a new server.

There are approximately 50 tables which get updated with almost 100%
records updated every 5 minutes - what is a good number of autovacuum
processes to have on these? The current server I am replacing only has
3 of them but I think I may gain a benefit from having more.

Watch pg_stat_user_tables and you can figure this out for your workload.
There are no generic answers in this area.

What in particular should I be looking at to help me decide?

Currently I have what I believe to be an aggressive bgwriter setting as
follows:

bgwriter_delay = 200ms # 10-10000ms between rounds

bgwriter_lru_maxpages = 1000 # 0-1000 max buffers
written/round

bgwriter_lru_multiplier = 10 # 0-10.0 multipler on buffers
scanned/round

Does this look right?

You'd probably be better off decreasing the delay rather than pushing up
the other two parameters. It's easy to tell if you did it right or not;
just look at pg_stat_bgwriter. If buffers_backend is high relative to
the others, that means the multiplier or delay is wrong. Or if
maxwritten_clean is increasing fast, that means bgwriter_lru_maxpages is
too low.

checkpoints_timed = 261

checkpoints_req = 0

buffers_checkpoint = 49058438

buffers_clean = 3562421

maxwritten_clean = 243

buffers_backend = 11774254

buffers_alloc = 42816578