Surely you can scrounge another half gig of RAM for these 1,000 users, no?  My laptop has as much RAM as your production server ... that's sick!

Your system shouldn't require a lot of care and feeding, no, once it's set up properly.  Just make sure you're running scripts based on our documentation examples to analyze and vacuum and backup your database regularly.

Ignore the Heidelberg discussion - their box is a sick puppy and whatever the cause is will probably turn out to be Solaris and/or Oracle specific, not of terribly pertinent interest to Linux/PG .LRN users.