poor performance when recreating constraints on large tables

[Mike Broers <mbroers@xxxxxxxxx>]

I originally posted this on admin, but it was suggested to post it to performance so here goes - 

I am in the process of implementing cascade on delete constraints retroactively on rather large tables so I can cleanly remove deprecated data.  The problem is recreating some foreign key constraints on tables of 55 million rows+ was taking much longer than the maintenance window I had, and now I am looking for tricks to speed up the process, hopefully there is something obvious i am overlooking.

here is the sql I am running, sorry im trying to obfuscate object names a little - 

BEGIN;

ALTER TABLE ONLY t1 DROP CONSTRAINT fk_t1_t2_id;

ALTER TABLE ONLY t1 ADD CONSTRAINT fk_t1_t2_id FOREIGN KEY(id) REFERENCES t2(id) 

ON DELETE CASCADE 

DEFERRABLE INITIALLY DEFERRED;

COMMIT;

t1 has 55 million rows

t2 has 72 million rows

the id columns are integer types

postgres version 8.3.8

there are nightly vacuum/analyze commands, and auto vacuum is enabled.

I have tried set constraints deferred, immediate, the id column on table 2 is indexed, its the primary key.  Nothing really seems to impact the time it takes to recreate the constraint.  There may be memory settings to tweak, I was able to get it to run on a faster test server with local storage in about 10 minutes, but it was running for over an hour in our production environment.. We took down the application and I verified it wasnt waiting for an exclusive lock on the table or anything, it was running the alter table command for that duration.  

Let me know if there is anything else I can supply that will help the review, thanks!

One additional question - is there any way to check how long postgres is estimating an operation will take to complete while it is running?

Thanks again,

Mike