PostgreSQL stopped / wont re-start

A deep bow to all the pgsql hackers. Excellent Db.

I've got this open source web-based game called
Merchant Empires (www.merchantempires.net) based on
Trade Wars. I opened the beta this past week,
a couple thousand people signed up and the game
is going great, my database move from 100K to
over 3 megs.

Today I shut the database down to increase the
number of backends, using -N 60 -B 130 (is that right?),
and for an extended period I couldn't get it to restart.
Running Mandrake 7.1 and PostgreSQL 7.03. The SysV
startup script would fail. I tried running pg_ctl as
postgres and that failed too. Does pg_ctl log its
failure somewhere?

Also thinking about mounting data dir from a ram disk.
Would this increase performance?

Thanks

please forward replies to bryan(at)dunsinane(dot)net