"Gavin M. Roy" <gmr@ehpg.net> writes:
> ... the issue seems to be more revolving around the
> backend getting so much cpu priority it's not allowing other backends to
> process, or something along those lines.
I can't think of any difference between 7.3 and 7.4 that would create
a problem of that sort where there was none before. For that matter,
since Postgres runs nonprivileged it's hard to see how it could create
a priority problem in any version. I thought the previous suggestion
about added use of hashtables was a pretty good idea. We could
confirm or disprove it by looking at EXPLAIN output.
regards, tom lane