Large # of Tables, Getting ready for the enterprise

As postgres becomes better and more in the spotlight there are a couple of 
issues I think that the hacker group might want to address to better prepare 
it for the enterprise and highend production systems.  Currently postgres 
will support an incredible amount of tables whereas Interbase only supports 
64K, but the efficiency and performance of the pg backend quickly 
degenerates after 1000 tables.  I know that most people will think that 
filesystem will be the bottleneck but as XFS nears completion the problem 
will shift back to pg.  It is my understanding that the system tables where 
lookups on tables occur are always done sequentially and not using any more 
optimized (btree etc) solution.  I also think this may be applicable to the 
toastable objects where large # of objects occur.  I want to start to look 
at the code to maybe help out but have a few questions:
1)  When referencing a table is it only looked up once and then cached or 
does a scan of the system table occur only once per session.
2)  Which files should I look at in tree.
3)  Any tips, suggestions, pitfalls I should remember.

Thanx for the pointers,
Carl Garland
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