High concurrency OLTP database performance tuning

Good morning,

I'd like to ask you some advice on pg tuning in a high
concurrency OLTP-like environment.
The application I'm talking about is running on Pg 8.0.1.
Under average users load, iostat and vmstat show that iowait stays
well under 1%. Tables and indexes scan and seek times are also good.
I can be reasonably sure that disk I/O is not the *main* bottleneck
here.

These OLTP transactions are composed each of 50-1000+ small queries, on
single tables or 2/3 joined tables. Write operations are very frequent,
and done concurrently by many users on the same data.

Often there are also queries which involve record lookups like:

SELECT DISTINCT rowid2 FROM table
WHERE rowid1 IN (<long_list_of_numerical_ids>) OR
refrowid1 IN (<long_list_of_numerical_ids>)

These files are structured with rowid fields which link
other external tables, and the links are fairly complex to follow.
SQL queries and indexes have been carefully(?) built and tested,
each with its own "explain analyze".

The problem is that under peak load, when n. of concurrent transactions
raises, there is a sensible performance degradation.
I'm looking for tuning ideas/tests. I plan to concentrate,
in priority order, on:

- postgresql.conf, especially:
effective_cache_size (now 5000)
bgwriter_delay (500)
commit_delay/commit_siblings (default)
- start to use tablespaces for most intensive tables
- analyze the locks situation while queries run
- upgrade to 8.1.n
- convert db partition filesystem to ext2/xfs?
(now ext3+noatime+data=writeback)
- ???

Server specs:
2 x P4 Xeon 2.8 Ghz
4 Gb RAM
LSI Logic SCSI 2x U320 controller
6 disks in raid 1 for os, /var, WAL
14 disks in raid 10 for db on FC connected storage

Current config is now (the rest is like the default):
max_connections = 100
shared_buffers = 8192
work_mem = 8192
maintenance_work_mem = 262144
max_fsm_pages = 200000
max_fsm_relations = 1000
bgwriter_delay = 500
fsync = false
wal_buffers = 256
checkpoint_segments = 32
effective_cache_size = 5000
random_page_cost = 2

Thanks for your ideas...

--
Cosimo