[GENERAL] 7.3.3 drop table takes very long time

[Eric Freeman]

I'm trying to drop a table and it's taking a very long time. There has been 
a lot of modification to the table and it has a lot of old data still being 
used as a result of not using the vacuum function enough. I ran an insert 
into and it was taking a long time (ran for about 48 hours) so I aborted it. 
I tried vacuuming it and that ran for about the same amount of time before I 
aborted. I figured the fastest ting would be to drop the table and re-create 
it.
I tried running a pg_dump and it ran for about 4 days without putting any of 
the data to the output file.
I started the drop table command yesterday and it's been running for almost 
24 hours.
I know it's processing because it's using up the CPU and I can run 
transactions on all of the other tables except this one. It has about 
132,000 records in the table.
Any ideas on how I can speed this up?
Can I go into the /data directory and find the file that contains that table 
and delete that? If so, how would I go about doing this?
Eric

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