gleeco <gleeco(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> Main question now: is there actually new work getting done when it
> repeats? ie. am i making progress?
Yes, I would expect so, especially since the tuple counts are varying
a bit. If it were always exactly the same tuple count then there might
be some reason to worry. If you weren't seeing any verbose output at
all, there would be much more reason to worry.
(FWIW, as of 9.6 or thereabouts there's some support for vacuum progress
tracking via pg_stat_activity. Won't help you now, but it's out there.)
regards, tom lane