One other wrinkle to note. After clearing out these rows, running 'VACUUM table2', 'ANALYZE table2' and 'REINDEX table table2', some queries with simple sequence scans were taking a few seconds to run even though there are only a thousand rows in the table. I finally found that running CLUSTER on the table sorted that out, even though we're on an SSD so I would have thought seeking all over the place for a seq. scan wouldn't have made that much difference. It obviously does still make some.
A VACUUM FULL table2 would have made the CLUSTER unnecesary. A normal VACUUM only marks dead rows as free but does not shrink the table. A VACUUM FULL removes all the free space from the table and returns it to the OS.
