Postgres 8.2.4 has some significant performance improvements even over 8.1.8. I have been amazed at the performance gains in some slow parts of the application

Postgres 8.2.4 has some significant performance improvements even over 8.1.8. I have been amazed at the performance gains in some slow parts of the application simply from upgrading to the latest version of Postgres. On the other side I'm very disappointed by the lack of real clustering. Slony addresses some needs but to me it feels like a hack. I'm starting to experiment with breaking up the data across multiple database servers. Sooner or later when the number of writes is high enough clustering breaks down due to the size of the replication traffic.