postgres bogged down beyond tolerance

Hi Everybody,

The postgres server I have (on redhat linux 2.6 with recent
Dell hardware (4 cpus)) is running terribly slow.

A job it should have gotten done in less than 1 hour
took 7.5 hours last night.

The job I am referencing above gets run via crontab every
evening and I comb the log file fairly diligently.  The
parameters used for the run are indicative as to what orange
I should use to compare to what orange.  The comparison is
not unreasonable is what I am asserting.


I checked kernel parameter
shmmax and it was set as 33554432.  I "fixed" it as
suggested by the manual:
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.2/static/kernel-resources.html

Namely, I shutdown the database, issued two commands:
  /sbin/sysctl -w kernel.shmmax=134217728
  /sbin/sysctl -w kernel.shmall=2097152
and rebooted the computer.

After it came up, I checked the shmmax and it is set
as 33554432.  Which surprised me.  Since I used -w
flag, I thought it should've written to /etc/sysctl.conf,
but there is no such entry at all and the data of this
file is from 2006.

Can somebody please give me a tip, insight as to what I
am missing, doing wrong?

Here's tail of serverlog file in my data directory:

[2007-11-14 08:53:48.062 PST] <gadb 2007-11-14 08:53:36 PST idle in transaction>LOG:  unexpected EOF on client connection
[2007-11-14 08:53:59.001 PST] <gadb 2007-11-14 08:53:48 PST idle in transaction>LOG:  unexpected EOF on client connection
[2007-11-14 08:54:10.782 PST] <gadb 2007-11-14 08:53:59 PST idle in transaction>LOG:  unexpected EOF on client connection
[2007-11-14 08:54:22.557 PST] <gadb 2007-11-14 08:54:10 PST idle in transaction>LOG:  unexpected EOF on client connection
[2007-11-14 08:54:34.282 PST] <gadb 2007-11-14 08:54:22 PST idle in transaction>LOG:  unexpected EOF on client connection
[2007-11-14 09:13:36.444 PST] <gadb 2007-11-14 09:13:24 PST idle in transaction>LOG:  unexpected EOF on client connection
[2007-11-14 09:13:43.637 PST] <gadb 2007-11-14 09:13:32 PST idle in transaction>LOG:  unexpected EOF on client connection
[2007-11-14 09:17:16.242 PST] <gadb 2007-11-14 09:17:03 PST idle in transaction>LOG:  unexpected EOF on client connection
[2007-11-14 09:39:22.841 PST] <gjoslyn 2007-11-14 09:39:22 PST SELECT>ERROR:  relation "msysconf" does not exist
[2007-11-14 09:39:22.842 PST] <gjoslyn 2007-11-14 09:39:22 PST SELECT>STATEMENT:  SELECT Config, nValue FROM MSysConf

Many thanks in advance.

Regards,

Tena Sakai
tsakai@gallo.ucsf.edu