"Gregory Maxwell" <gmaxwell(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> So it's by design that these now bloated index won't shrink if let
> unvacuumed? I didn't expect to hit something like that.
Well, the VACUUM FULL algorithm is incapable of shrinking indexes ---
the only way is REINDEX, or something else that reconstructs indexes
from scratch, such as CLUSTER. One of the things we need to look into
is putting more smarts into VACUUM so that it automatically does
something reasonable when faced with extreme cases like these.
regards, tom lane