On 2011-08-12, at 09:32 , Merlin Moncure wrote: > In my opinion before looking at postgresql.conf you need to make sure > your queries and their plans are good. fire up pgfouine and see where > those 60 minutes are gettings spent. maybe you have a problem query > that demands optimization. Thanks for your advice, I am sure to look into what you said. I might just add some background information. The process used to take 266 minutes to complete - which I got down to 49 minutes. I spent a LOT of time optimising queries, implementing multithreading to utilise the extra cores and place more load on the DB that way etc. So that being done as best I can for now, I am focussing on the DB itself. I am a firm believer the best place to optimise is first the queries / code THEN the hardware / fine tuning the parameters. The fsync = off was because the production system runs on a uber expensive SAN system with multipathing over Fibre Channel, it is on UPS and backup generators in a secure datacenter, and we have daily backups we can fall back to. -- Sent via pgsql-performance mailing list (pgsql-performance@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-performance