Significantly larger toast tables on 8.4?

I just did a fresh import of my alpha database into 8.4 and noticed
that the size of the database had increased significantly:

8.4: 6.3G
8.3: 4.9G

Tracking it down the main difference seems to a toast tables namely this one:

ls -ltrh 8.3/base/16516/430156
-rw------- 1 postgres postgres 145M 2009-01-01 00:12 8.3/base/16516/430156

and the same toast table in 8.4:

ls -ltrh 8.4/base/16513/347706
-rw------- 1 postgres postgres 967M 2009-01-01 20:56 8.4/base/16513/347706

This table consists mainly of perl Storable binary blobs in a bytea
column schema looks like:

Column | Type |
Modifiers
---------------+--------------------------+---------------------------------------------------------------------
action | text |
die_id | integer | not null default
nextval('dies_die_id_seq'::regclass)
cparam | bytea |
date_created | timestamp with time zone | not null default now()
db_profile | bytea |
debug | bytea |
defunct | smallint | not null default 0
env | bytea |
login | bytea |
msg | text |
open_user_id | integer |
page_load_id | integer |
session_id | integer |
state | bytea |
state_action | bytea |
user_id | integer |
whoops | bytea |
Indexes:
"dies_pkey" PRIMARY KEY, btree (die_id)

My hunch is its related to
http://git.postgresql.org/?p=postgresql.git;a=commit;h=3b6942b3f2fe733572c05a71cb2d12e5ece60cdbits
or for the CVS inclined
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-committers/2008-03/msg00121.php

But if anything that looks like it should help reduce size...

Ideas?