High Load on Postgres 7.4.16 Server

Hello All

I sent this message to the admin list and it never got through so I
am trying the performance list.
We moved our application to a new machine last night. It is a Dell
PowerEdge 6950 2X Dual Core. AMD Opteron 8214 2.2Ghz. 8GB Memory. The
machine is running Redhat AS 4 Upd 4 and Redhat Cluster Suite. The SAN is an
EMC SAS connected via fibre. We are using Postgres 7.4.16. We have recently
had some major hardware issues and replaced the hardware with brand new Dell
equipment. We expected a major performance increase over the previous being
the old equipment was nearly three years old
I will try and explain how things are configured. We have 10
separate postmasters running 5 on each node. Each of the postmasters is a
single instance of each database. Each database is separated by division and
also we have them separate so we can restart an postmaster with needing to
restart all databases My largest database is about 7 GB. And the others run
anywhere from 100MB - 1.8GB.
The other configuration was RHEL3 and Postgres 7.4.13 and Redhat
Cluster Suite. The application seemed to run much faster on the older
equipment.
My thoughts on the issues are that I could be something with the OS
tuning. Here is what my kernel.shmmax, kernel.shmall = 1073741824. Is there
something else that I could tune in the OS. My max_connections=35 and shared
buffers=8192 for my largest database.

Thanks