VACUUM ANALYZE extremely slow

This is my first (and, by the love of the God, last) project w/pgsql
and everything but the simplest selects is so slow I want to cry.
This is especially bad with vacuum analyze - it takes several hours
for a database of mere 15 Gb on a fast double-core server w/2Gb of RAM
and virtually no workload at the moment. Maintenance work mem is set
to 512 Mb.

Is there any way to speed up ANALYZE? Without it all the queries run
so slow that I want to cry after a couple of hours of operation and
with it system has to go down for hours per day and that is
unacceptable.

The same database running on mysql on basically the same server used
to run optimize table on every table every half an hour without any
problem, I am actually pondering scraping half the work on the
conversion and stuff and going back to mysql but I wonder if there's
some way to improve it.