tweaks for write-intensive dbs ?

can anyone offer some suggestions on tweaking a system for write-
intensive operations?

my new box is running great for reads / selects , and with 60
connections on tests.

however i'm in the middle of a schema migration / audit, and its
taking ungodly slow.

selecting + analyzing 10,000 records with thousands of queries is no
issue -- its only taking ~ 3 seconds.

but the updating of the records as having been audited ( a bool
flag ) takes 5-10 minutes per set.

the read and write operations are pulling up the data via the
relevant indexes according to analyze.

i've tried turning fsync off, but no luck there.

if anyone could suggest some improvement tips, i'd be grateful. the
system isn't huge (only ~5M records ) , but its taking a rather long
enough time that any extra speed i can come up with would be a huge
improvement..

// Jonathan Vanasco

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