In my previous post I failed to mention that after we stopped the
applications and found that autovacuum remained idle for several
minutes, we restarted postgres before cleaning up the bloat on
the problem table.
Also, the log shows that autovacuum stopped kicking in after
4:43 p.m. on Friday. It was at about this point that I was
dropping and creating indexes through psql. I did not use
BEGIN TRANSACTION, but I went home with an index being
built on a large table, so that connection remained open until
Sunday at 9:00 p.m. I don't know if that matters, but I'm trying
to be thorough.
-Kevin