I don't really care about the tab-completion speed - it's just that its slowness was my "heads-up" to the fact that there could be something related to number of tables to worry about. Interestingly, however, bash tab completion on the files in the database directory is still instantaneous.
The quoted linux-kernel thread about filesystem performance is related to creating and deleting files (the typical "untar" and "mail server" benchmarks) which is not typical of what postgres does - it simply opens them. I was unaware that ext3 had a tree structure - I assumed that its backward compatibility with ext2 made that impossible. So that's another thing I don't need to worry about.
Regards,
--Phil.
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