> Whatever the case, the database still slows down to a halt after a month or
> so, and I have to go in and shut everything down and do a VACUUM FULL by
> hand. One index (of many many) takes 2000 seconds to vacuum. The whole
> process takes a few hours.
Do a REINDEX on that table instead, and regular vacuum more frequently.
> $ pg_config --version
> PostgreSQL 7.3.2
7.4.x deals with index growth a little better 7.3 and older did.