We have a pretty busy linux server running postgres 8.1.4, waiting to upgrade until 8.3 to avoid dump/restoring twice. # cat /proc/meminfo total: used: free: shared: buffers: cached: Mem: 3704217600 3592069120 112148480 0 39460864 2316271616 Swap: 2516918272 270336 2516647936 # cat /proc/cpuinfo processor : 0 vendor_id : GenuineIntel cpu family : 15 model : 4 model name : Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 3.00GHz stepping : 3 cpu MHz : 2992.795 The postgresql.conf was basically the default so I decided to increase the cache size and a couple paramaters to make more use of that memory - here's what I did: shared_buffers = 16384 (was 1000) work_mem = 16384 (was 1024) wal_buffers = 24 (was 8) checkpoint_segments = 5 (was 3) effective_cache_size = 10000 (was 1000) stats_command_string = on (was off) stats_block_level = on (was off) stats_row_level = on (was off) In order to do this I had to change /proc/sys/kernel/shmmax to 536870912 (don't have /etc/sysctl) Also, the entire cluster gets vacuumed analyzed nightly. After making these changes, the performance on the server actually worsened. I slowly backed off on some of the paramaters but didn't seem to help. Wondering if those changes are silly? For a server this size I didn't think this would be problematic. Thank you, Josh ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 5: don't forget to increase your free space map settings