>>> I wrote:
> I tried the same run on 8.4devel and it is still running after
> 20 minutes. I will let it cook for a while.
It's now been an hour and 30 minutes; so, while 8.4 does a much better
job of estimating how many rows will be returned, the plan it
generates is much slower for this query.
FWIW I'll attach the results of vmstat 1 below. The machine a
replication target and is receiving a little over 100 database
transactions per second, but is otherwise fairly idle, except for this
long-running query.
-Kevin