William,
> I already have fsync off. Short of buying more hardware -- which I will
> probably do anyways once I figure out whether I need more CPU, memory or
> disk -- what else can I do to max out the speed? Operation mix is about
> 50% select, 40% insert, 10% update.
Disk. Multi-channel RAID is where it's at, and/or RAID with a great write
cache enabled. For really fast updates, I'd suggest 6-disk or even 8-disk
RAID 1+0.
As soon as you have gobs of extra disk space, jack your checkpoint_buffers way
up, like a couple of gigs.
--
Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco