Alex,
> The new machine will have 48 GB of RAM, so figuring out starting
> points for the Shared Buffers and Work_mem/Maintenance_work_mem is
> going to be a crap shoot, since the defaults still seem to be based
> upon 256MB of RAM or less.
Why a crap shoot?
Set shared_buffers to 12GB. Set work_mem to 20GB / # of concurrent active
connections (check your logs). Set Maint_mem to 2GB (I don't think we can
actually use more). Then tune from there.
Also, use 8.2 or later, and you'd better compile 64-bit.
--
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL @ Sun
San Francisco