"Paragon" <lr(at)pcorp(dot)us> writes:
>> Sure looks like a near-idle machine to me :-(.
>> I think that the vacuum must be stuck on a lock. What other Postgres
>> processes have you got, and what are they doing?
> Originally I thought it was the autovacuuming getting in the way since I
> noticed sometimes it was trying to vacuum the tables I was trying to vacuum
> and autovacuuming was taking a long time, but I had turned autovacuuming off
> during bulk load process period to prevent this.
Hmm ... another reason for vacuum running really slowly would be poor
choices of vacuum_cost parameters --- have you got those set to
nondefault values?
regards, tom lane