Recommended Postgres settings to speed up indexing on a 100GB database? I have just installed Postgres 9.1 on a server with 32GB of RAM and 320GB solid-state disk. 

I will be using this server to serve both my site and my database (i.e. it's not just a database server). The database is 500m rows, approximately 120GB of data. 

Once the data is loaded, the database needs to be optimised for SELECT queries - the data is fairly static in nature, and only changes once every three months. 99% of the queries made to the database will be reads. 

I'm wondering what would be good Postgres settings to start out with. I've set:

effective_cache_size 8GB
shared_buffers 4GB


in the Postgres config file, but I haven't touched any of the other defaults. 

With the settings above, I'm finding it very slow (more than an hour and still running) to create an index on one field in my table, and I want to create many of them. 

Are there other settings I could look at to make index creation faster? Or can I safely increase these settings?
If I were setting up a new server, I wouldn't use anything below 9.3.6.  There have been many improvements since 9.1.  

And if you use 9.4.1, there is some code to let it use larger amounts of RAM for index creation than it previously could.

Neither of the parameters you listed are particularly important for creating indexes.  The most critical for that purpose would be maintenance_work_mem.    On a 32GB server, if I'm only building one index at a time and keeping a close eye on things, I'd set it to 16GB for the local session that is building the large index.

Also, the C collation is much faster than the other collations, if you have a choice.

Is the bottleneck CPU or IO?