FYI: Load times for a largish DB in 8.2 vs. 8.3 vs. 8.4

Hi,

First, the numbers:

PG Version Load time pg_database_size autovac
----------------------------------------------------------
8.2.13 179 min 92,807,992,820 on
8.3.7 180 min 84,048,744,044 on (defaults)
8.4b2 206 min 84,028,995,344 on (defaults)
8.4b2 183 min 84,028,839,696 off

The bulk of the data is in 16 tables, each having about 55 million rows of
the form (int, int, smallint, smallint, int, int, int). Each table has a
single partial index on one of the integer columns. The dump file was 14GB
compressed.

The loads were all done on the same machine, with the DB going on a pair
of SATA drives in a RAID-0 stripe. The machine has 2 non-HT Xeons and
8GB RAM. maintenance_work_mem was set to 512MB in all three cases.

-- todd