On Thu, 22 May 2008, Tom Lane wrote:
Do you have maintenance_work_mem set large enough that the index creation sort is done in-memory? 8.1 depends on the platform's qsort and a lot of them are kinda pessimal for input like this.
Looking at the fact that other indexes on the same table are created quickly, it seems that the maintenance_work_mem isn't the issue - the sort algorithm is.
Having lots of elements the same value is a worst-case-scenario for a naive quicksort. I am in the middle of testing sorting algorithms for a performance lecture I'm going to give, and one of the best algorithms I have seen yet is that used in Java's java.util.Arrays.sort(). I haven't been able to beat it with any other comparison sort yet (although I have beaten it with a bucket sort, but I wouldn't recommend such an algorithm for a database).
