[Q] optmizing postgres for 'single client' / many small queries

Hi,
our application is using Postgres in a rather unusuall way.
It is used by a GUI application to store several hundred
thousand 'parameters'. Basically it is used like a big INI
file.

There are about 50 tables with various parameters.

The application typicall goes like this

select id, child_tb_key_id, <fields with parms> from tb1

then for each selected row above
select from the child table do a select (like the above)

and so on -- many levels deep

I know that it is not a proper way to use SQL
Instead we should be selecting many rows at once, joining them/etc

But it is what it is now...

Queries are very fast though, Postgres reports that the
all the queries for a typical 'load' operation take 0.8 seconds
-- however overall time that the GUI user perceives is 8 seconds.
Out of that 8 seconds a big chunk is in the sending of the SQL
statements/receiving results back -- just network traffic, parsing/etc

There are total about 2400 queries that happen in that period of time
(just selects)

I am trying to figure out how can I optimize PG configuration
to suite such a contrived deployment of Postgres.

For example, we do not mind PG running on the same machine
as the Client app (it is connected via Qt Sql Pg plugin (so it uses
Pg native access library underneath).

Are there any optmization can be done for that?

Also this is a 'single' client/single connection system
what optimizations can be done for that?

and finally since most of the queries are very quick index-based
selects what can be done to optimize the traffic between pg and
the client?

thank you in advance for
any recommendations/pointers.

--
Vlad P
author of C++ ORM http://github.com/vladp/CppOrm/tree/master

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