> I know I haven't provided a whole lot of application-level detail here,
You did !
What about :
- using COPY instead of INSERT ?
(should be easy to do from the aggregators)
- using Bizgres ?
(which was designed for your use case)
- splitting the xlog and the data on distinct physical drives or arrays
- benchmarking something else than ext3
(xfs ? reiser3 ?)