8 way Intel Xeon system

Hi all,

Hopefully a quick query.

Is there anything special I should look at when configuring either
PostgreSQL and Linux to work together on an 8-way Intel P-III based system?

I currently have the database system running fairly nicely on a 2 CPU
Pentium-II 400 server with 512MB memory, hardware RAID with 32MB cache on
the controllers, unfortunately the db file systems are RAID-5 but I am not
in a position to change that.

I'm mainly interested in what I should concentrate on from a
Linux/PostgreSQL config point of view to see if we can take advantage of the
extra CPUs. - Yes it's overkill but this is a piece of surplus hardware we
don't have to buy.

Perhaps some may say Linux isn't the best option for an 8 CPU server but
this is what I have to work with for reasons we won't get into :-)

The current usage is along the lines of a few thousands updates spread over
the space of a few hours in the morning then followed by a thousand select
queries to do some reporting.

The server also runs an apache web server for people to access but is only
used to view html files on a fairly ad-hoc basis, nothing serious on the web
side of things.

Currently RedHat 9 with PostgreSQL 7.3.2 installed.

Thanks for your time

Linz