Andrew Perrin <andrew_perrin@unc.edu> writes:
> shared_buffers is set to 128 in postgresql.conf - is that what you
> mean?
That's awfully small. On any modern machine you should be setting it in
the low thousands. (Yeah, I know the default is only 64. We've had
discussions about changing that ...) Note you must restart the
postmaster to get this change to take effect.
> HOWEVER... what I'm hearing from most folks is that, even under these
> conditions, the performance I'm experiencing is worse than
> expected. If that's true, what should I do to diagnose that?
Have you shown us the specific query and the EXPLAIN output for it?
regards, tom lane