> I am still trying to figure out if the database was getting any
> automatic vacuuming at all. The Postgres documentation (the database is
> 8.2, though I'm moving to 8.3 soon) sounds as if it's on automatically,
> but the Debian-specific documentation suggests I may need to do some
> additional things to enable it.
This is probably far too late but anyway. You do indeed have to enable
autovacuum with 8.2, as it isn't enabled by default, at least with
most distributions. 8.3 it's by default with most distributions.
# show autovacuum;
will tell you if it's on.
Cheers
Anton