"Joshua D. Drake" <jd(at)commandprompt(dot)com> writes:
> At this point, you are in a world of hurt :). If you stop a vacuum you
> have created a huge mess of dead rows in that table.
Only if it was a vacuum full, which he didn't mention having tried.
I'm kinda wondering whether the vacuum and reindex did anything at all,
or were blocked by some other process holding a lock on the table.
If they weren't blocked, then the problem is insufficient patience,
possibly combined with insufficient maintenance_work_mem.
regards, tom lane