> The archives of this list provides many ideas for improving performance,
> but the problem we are having is gradually degrading performance ending
> in postgres shutting down. So it's not a matter of optimizing a complex
> query to take 5 seconds instead of 60 seconds. >From what I can tell we
> are using the VACUUM command on a schedule but it doesn't seem to
> prevent the database from becoming "congested" as we refer to it. :]
Our busy website has a cronjob that runs VACUUM ANALYZE once an hour
(vacuumdb -a -q -z).
Have you tried going 'VACUUM FULL ANALYZE' (vacuumdb -a -q -z -f)
instead of a dump and reload?
Chris