sun solaris & postgres

OK, we have two different solaris machines:

SunOS att 5.8 Generic sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-60
and
SunOS steph 5.8 Generic_108528-06 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-4

att is running
psql (PostgreSQL) 7.0.3
contains readline, history, multibyte support

and steph is running
psql (PostgreSQL) 7.2
contains support for: readline, history, multibyte

We've got a web server using the postgres database for its queries.
We're seeing some contradictory data, some of which suggests that
att is faster than steph and at other times the other way around.

If we search on an item that is not to be found in our entries,
steph goes through the postgres entries faster than att, perhaps
by about 10% (not a markedly faster rate, but distinctly faster).
If we search on an item that is commonly found and display 100
results at a time on each page, then what takes att 5 seconds to
generate and display takes steph 30 seconds to do the same thing.

Our tech support is convinced that postgres is running slower on
steph.  I don't think that's the entire story, given the different
results for the different kinds of searches, but I'd appreciate any
suggestions or feedback any of you have, particularly in regards to
what might improve performance on steph.

Is there any indication that 7.2 is slower overall than 7.0.3?

We use the same script to set up the postgres files on each machine,
so they're both configured the same way with respect to indexing
and vaccum/analyse.

Thanks,
--Cindy
--
ctmoore@uci.edu