there are several thing to check in your performace issues:
Do an onstat -p (as was already suggested) NOte the following items :buffreads %cached bufwaits
the bufwaits should be LESS THAN 1% of buffreads
You also need to check your check point interval (in seconds)
Also do an onstat -F Note the number of FG,LRU and Chunk writes. Chunk writes are the most efficient.
To adjust this, lower the values for LRU Max dirty and LRU Min Dirty. I suggest starting at 10 and 5 for these. This will help keep your LRU cache "cleaner" and drastically lower your checkpoint times - by lessing the amount of data that needs to be written out to disk during a checkpoint. Also check the number of page cleaners and LRU queues. Keep both values the same - 127 is the max.
As for the number of buffers - I have 4Gb Ram (8 databases, about .75gb ea, and 80 users.) I have 175000 Buffers. Your choice really - how much use are you going to have - I'd start by dropping that number to 50000 and working up from there -
My checkpoint times rarely exceed 4 seconds......
Last question - UNIX or nt ?? My suggestions are based on my experience with our SCO Unix boxes running 7.31 UC5 on OpenServer 5.0.6
Hope this helps..... There are a lot of variables ot take into consideration when perf. tuning.....
You also didn't mention what kind of performance increases you were looking for, and in what area of performance.