> I have 7.2.4 running on a Sun box, so I tried that too, with similar
> results. tsearch just doesn't seem to work very well on this dataset
> (or any other large dataset I've tried).
Well, as I've shown - works fine for me...
I strongly suggest you repost your problem report to -hackers, since the
fact that the tsearch developers haven't chimed in implies to me that
they don't watch the performance list.
BTW, read this about Gist indexes:
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/limitations.html
(Note lack of concurrency)
Chris