Re: Turning off transactions completely.

"Arsalan Zaidi" <azaidi@directi.com> writes:
> I already do this. However, I don't want *any* transactions at all.

Perhaps you want MySQL ;-)

Seriously, transactions per se are not your problem, and you can't turn
them off anyway, so there's no point in continuing to bark up that tree.

What I think you are really unhappy about is the WAL/checkpoint
activity, and that you can control to some extent.  For starters, have
you turned off fsync?  Another thing to consider is increasing the
CHECKPOINT_SEGMENTS parameter (and possibly WAL_FILES too), which will
increase the amount of disk space used for the WAL log, but should
reduce the amount of datafile disk traffic.  If the postmaster log shows
a lot of snippy little notices about "consider increasing WAL_FILES",
then you should do that.  If you have multiple disk drives, see if you
can put the WAL files (pg_xlog subdirectory) on a different disk spindle
than the data files.

There are also the usual tuning questions about whether you've set the
number of shared buffers to something reasonable, etc. etc.

            regards, tom lane