Thanks to all who've responded to my concern about scalability with
large numbers of tables. I am reasonably reassured.
I don't really care about the tab-completion speed - it's just that its
slowness was my "heads-up" to the fact that there could be something
related to number of tables to worry about. Interestingly, however,
bash tab completion on the files in the database directory is still
instantaneous.
The quoted linux-kernel thread about filesystem performance is related
to creating and deleting files (the typical "untar" and "mail server"
benchmarks) which is not typical of what postgres does - it simply opens
them. I was unaware that ext3 had a tree structure - I assumed that its
backward compatibility with ext2 made that impossible. So that's
another thing I don't need to worry about.
Regards,
--Phil.