>One action we have consiously not done is "REINDEX" on the >table. We want to avoid that as far as possible.
Why? It's usually a very painless step, unless the table has millions and millions of rows. We reindex tables with multiple indexes and several million rows on a weekly basis. The only downside is that the table seems to be quite "busy" during the process, which only takes a few minutes. AFAIK, VACUUM doesn't reclaim space taken up by indexes. In fact, the more deletes you do, the larger the index space gets, and the *slower* the index performs. A periodic REINDEX cleans up a lot of problems. ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 4: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster