Creating indexes with PostGIS using all CPU cores

Question

I have to run a whole bunch of GIST index creation, on some tables containing lots of records (scale of many countries, OSM data):

CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY IF NOT EXISTS osm_footways_gist ON osm_footways USING GIST (geom);
....

(more info here: https://www.2ndquadrant.com/en/blog/create-index-concurrently/ )

The time needed to run them all is quite long, it can be up to several hours on a common desktop computer.

But I noticed that it uses only one single CPU core.

Would it be possible to run such index creation queries using all available CPU cores (or a predetermined number of them)?

202002192007 Edit

According to https://www.cybertec-postgresql.com/en/postgresql-parallel-create-index-for-better-performance/ I've tried this:

SET max_parallel_maintenance_workers TO 48;
SET maintenance_work_mem TO '128 GB';
ALTER TABLE osm_footways SET (parallel_workers = 48);
CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY IF NOT EXISTS osm_footways_gist ON osm_footways USING GIST (geom);
....

But still have 1 CPU core working.

Info:

>>> psql
# select Version();
                 version  
---------------------------------------
 PostgreSQL 11.10 (Debian 11.10-1.pgdg90+1) on x86_64-pc-linux-gnu,
 compiled by gcc (Debian 6.3.0-18+deb9u1) 6.3.0 20170516, 64-bit
(1 row)

# select postgis_version();
            postgis_version            
---------------------------------------
 2.5 USE_GEOS=1 USE_PROJ=1 USE_STATS=1
(1 row)

Dockerized.

Answer 1

GIST index building cannot utilize multiple cores yet.

PostgreSQL can build indexes while leveraging multiple CPUs in order to process the table rows faster. This feature is known as parallel index build. For index methods that support building indexes in parallel (currently, only B-tree)

https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql-createindex.html