Thank you Jeff, now it works!

This is my first installation with postgres 7.2.3 and I never observed a similar difference in performance with 7.1 : do you suggest running vacuumdb dayly?

As a side note this is also my first installation from source (I always used Jonathan's RPM) and another oddity is that when doing

ps -ef | grep nsd

I was used to see several threads, while now I see only one nsd process. Is this normal?

Thank You again,
Claudio

Claudio,

VACUUMing your database is *crucial* to performance. It needs to be done at least once daily, and several times a day if your database receives lots of updates, inserts or deletes.

Please read the PostgreSQL Administrator's Guide and famialirize yourself with what it takes to maintain a PostgreSQL server.

Also, you're probably running with PostgreSQL defaults, which are very conservative. If you have a more modern machine, you could up those defaults and get much better performance. Search google for "postgresql performance".

-Roberto