I have been wrestling with the configuration of the dedicated Postges 9.0.3 server at work and granted, there's more activity on the production server, but the same queries take twice as long on the beefier server than my mac at home. I have pasted what I have changed in postgresql.conf - I am wondering if there's any way one can help me change things around to be more efficient.
Dedicated PostgreSQL 9.0.3 Server with 16GB Ram
Heavy write and read (for reporting and calculations) server.
max_connections = 350
shared_buffers = 4096MB
work_mem = 32MB
maintenance_work_mem = 512MB
seq_page_cost = 0.02 # measured on an arbitrary scale
random_page_cost = 0.03
cpu_tuple_cost = 0.02
effective_cache_size = 8192MB
The planner costs seem a bit low but this was from suggestions from this very list a while ago.