I'm trying to optimize performance on my development laptop, one of the main bottlenecks beeing a 4200 rpm disk. It's a fairly good machine (Pentium M, 1,73GHz, 1GB RAM), but pg doesn't seem to use the processing power: the disk works all of the time. I'm working with a database with a couple of hundred thousands of rows and a couple of redundant tables with dozens of columns. The operations that takes ages are cache updates. I'd like pg to use more memory and CPU and work as much as possible with no disk writes: data integrity isn't a very high priority here. Aside from setting shared_buffers to 30200 (close to 250 MB), fsync to off and autovacuum to on, and setting a bigger max shared memory space (echo 256000000 > /proc/sys/kernel/shmmax) I'm lost as to what else to do. My disk doesn't stop working when I update several thousand records in the redundant table and it's kind of surprising, given that the entire database could (theoretically) fit into the 250 MB shared memory space. Any hints? Cheers, t.n.a.
