Sluggish inserts/updates ?

    I've got a system in which a row is being created by one process,
a notify is sent, and another process finds and then deletes the
row.  This whole interchange seems to be taking about a second, which
seems oddly slow.  As far as I know, I have the fsync-on-anything
turned off (*).
I'm mainly wondering if I should index/not index the key of the
table, and if I should blame the hardware or Postgres?  The hard
drive on the R&D server is pretty slow, although the CPU is pretty
dang fast.  I could also blame the notification system but that
shouldn't be a problem, right?


* Is there a good way to find out if this option is on/off?

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