Dear all first of all congratulations on your greak work here since from time to time i 've found many answers to my problems. unfortunately for this specific problem i didnt find much relevant information, so i would ask for your guidance dealing with the following situation: we have a dedicated server (8.4.4, redhat) with 24 cpus and 36 GB or RAM. i would say that the traffic in the server is huge and the cpu utilization is pretty high too (avg ~ 75% except during the nights when is it much lower). i am trying to tune the server a little bit to handle this problem. the incoming data in the database are about 30-40 GB /day. at first the checkpoint_segments were set to 50, the checkpoint_timeout at 15 min and the checkpoint_completion_target was 0.5 sec. i noticed that the utilization of the server was higher when it was close to making a checkpoint and since the parameter of full_page_writes is ON , i changed the parameters mentioned above to (i did that after reading a lot of stuff online): checkpoint_segments->250 checkpoint_timeout->40min checkpoint_completion_target -> 0.8 but the cpu utilization is not significantly lower. another parameter i will certainly change is the wal_buffers which is now set at 64KB and i plan to make it 16MB. can this parameter cause a significant percentage of the problem? are there any suggestions what i can do to tune better the server? i can provide any information you find relevant for the configuration of the server, the OS, the storage etc thank you in advance heavy load-high cpu itilization -- View this message in context: http://postgresql.1045698.n5.nabble.com/heavy-load-high-cpu-itilization-tp4635691p4635691.html Sent from the PostgreSQL - admin mailing list archive at Nabble.com. -- Sent via pgsql-admin mailing list (pgsql-admin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-admin