How can I speed up update/replace operations in PostgreSQL?

Question

We have a rather specific application that uses PostgreSQL 8.3 as a storage backend (using Python and psycopg2). The operations we perform to the important tables are in the ma

Answer 1

I had a similar situation a few months ago and ended up getting the largest speed boost from a tuned chunk/transaction size. You may also want to check the log for a checkpoint warning during the test and tune appropriately.