Postgresql improving access efficiency

Question

I created a postgres table which looks like:

name   ID   SNO
jack   12   1
bob    123  2
andy   34   3
jack   23   4

etc. It has a total of 41 million entries. SNO is my primary key of continuous INT values. When I run a query to select a particular SNO, it works lightning fast. However! My need is to run the query on 'name' which should return all instances of a particular name. Note that names need not be unique and are most likely repeated but with different ID's. A query to search for a name takes way to long to find. I tried creating an index on 'name' using this:

CREATE INDEX name ON userlist(name)

However, while this improves performance, it is still way too slow. Is there any way that I can index 'name' which is a 'text' data type to improve access performance as much as accessing the 'int' SNO?

Answer 1

Try to make enough space for the index in memory. The shared_buffers setting can be helpful in this.