I have tested Tom's original patch now. The good news -- it works great in terms of reducing the load imposed by vacuum -- almost to the level of being unnoticeable. The bad news -- in a simulation test which loads an hour's worth of data, even with delay set to 1 ms, vacuum of the large table exceeds two hours (vs 12-14 minutes with delay = 0). Since that hourly load is expected 7 x 24, this obviously isn't going to work.
If memory serves, the problem is that you actually sleep 10ms even when you set it to 1. One of the thing changed in Jan's later patch was the ability to specify how many pages to work on before sleeping, rather than how long to sleep inbetween every 1 page. You might be able to do a quick hack and have it do 10 pages or so before sleeping.
Matthew
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