perfomance question/issues

How can you tell what the performance of you DB is?  I know a lot has to do with DB design..  I don't see postgres
usinga lot of memory or cpu on my system.. but everything seems a little slow for what I consider a small DB.. 

What I have is 4 static columns that are indexed and roughly 460 that are updated.  Now I have only 215 rows.  If I
updateall of the columns then run vacuum analyze it takes 7-10 minutes.   I also have had trouble doing updates... I
havetried doing them through perl and psql by doing a \i then the file name.. I have also tried using begin; and end;
aroundthe file.. but it still takes 1 minute+ to update one row.  any suggestions are welcome. 

Travis