Markus Bertheau <twanger@bluetwanger.de> writes:
>> You could probably improve the index-create time by temporarily
>> increasing sort_mem. It wouldn't be unreasonable to give CREATE INDEX
>> several hundred meg to work in. (You don't want sort_mem that big
>> normally, because there may be many sorts happening in parallel,
>> but in a data-loading context there'll just be one active sort.)
> Doesn't this provide a reason for CREATE INDEX not to honour sort_mem?
Already done for 7.5.
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-committers/2004-02/msg00025.php
regards, tom lane