"Brandon Black" <blblack(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote ...
Increasing shared_buffers seems to always help, even out to half of the dev box's ram (2G).
Though officially PG does not prefer huge shared_buffers size, I did see several times that performance was boosted in case IO is the bottleneck. Also, if you want to use big bufferpool setting, make sure your version has Tom's split BufMgrLock patch
(http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-committers/2005-03/msg00025.php), which might already in 8.0.x somewhere. And if you want to use bufferpool bigger than 2G on 64-bit machine, you may need 8.1 (http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-committers/2005-08/msg00221.php).
Regards,
Qingqing