it's there a better way to do this. I'm testing on version 9.2 BUT production server is 8.4 (legacy application, supposed to be in at least 9.2 but recently discovered it was 8.4, planning upgrade but not now). Config parameters are default ones.
PostgreSQL 8.4 came out in 2009 and hit EOL in 2014. PostgreSQL 9.2 hit EOL in 2017.