"Trevor Ball" <TBall(at)eppcon(dot)com> writes:
> ... it doesn't
> seem reasonable to me that an index would slow an insert more than
> 50-fold, regardless of hardware or the nature of the index.
Seems pretty slow to me too. Can you provide a self-contained test
case?
One possibility is that depending on your platform and locale setting,
varchar comparisons can be a whole lot slower than a normal person would
consider sane. If you're not using C locale, you might try C locale and
see if it helps.
regards, tom lane