Thanks everyone for the help. I have now run simple VACUUM but it didn't change anything, the simple SELECT is still slow.
My understanding by reading the docs is that it should reclaim all unused space, just not return it to the OS. Which is fine by me. Any idea why it failed to reclaim the space in my case? I'm now running VACUUM FULL as everyone suggested. I just tried plain VACUUM as I was curious if it would work and because it doesn't lock the table with an operation that takes hours for my setup. Thanks, Dimitris
