> 4. Are there any other settings in the conf file I could try to tweak?
One more thing :-)
I stumbled over this setting, this made the db (PG 7.4.9) make use of
the index rather than doing a sequential scan and it reduced a query
from several minutes to some 20 seconds.
random_page_cost = 2 (original value was 4).
Another thing you ought to do is to to get the four-five most used
queries and do an explain analyze in these. Since our website wasn't
prepared for this type of statistics I simply did a tcpdump, grep'ed
all select's, sorted them and sorted them unique so I could see which
queries were used most.
regards
Claus