> This appears to be a "yes" answer to my question above. Out of the
> box, PostgreSQL is set up to be able to run on a 1992-vintage SGI
> Indy with 8 M of RAM (ok, I may be exaggerating, but only by a bit);
> it is not tuned for performance. Running without even tweaking the
> shared buffers is guaranteed to get you lousy performance.
I see this as a major problem. How many people run postgres, decide it's
too slow and give up without digging into the documentation or coming to
this group? This seems to be pretty common. Even worst, they tell 10
others how slow Postgres is and then it gets a bad reputation.
In my opinion the defaults should be set up for a typical database server
machine.
Michael