Tom,
Neither database has and per-table autovacuum settings.
However, since this is a production database, I had to try something,
and set vacuum_cost_limit up to 1000. The issue with vacuuming one page
at a time went away, or at least I have not seen it repeat in the last
16 hours.
--
-- Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
http://www.pgexperts.com