[Geocoding] Large index crashes postgres

[Frans Hals]

Hi,

running a working example of gazetteer, but still one of the most important
indexes is missing and so the search is slow.
But whenever I try to add the follwing index to table "placex", one of the
postmaster processes dies and the server restarts.

CREATE INDEX idx_placex_sector ON placex USING btree
(geometry_sector(geometry), rank_address, osm_type, osm_id);

The table counts around 50.000.000 rows.
The first 20.000.000 are indexed in 20-30 minutes.
Then indexing becomes slow and slower, first taking 100.000 rows in ten
minutes while further consequently decreasing speed.
When the job reaches something around row 25.000.000 postgres goes down:

WARNING:  terminating connection because of crash of another server process
DETAIL:  The postmaster has commanded this server process to roll back the
current transaction and exit, because another server process exited
abnormally and possibly corrupted shared memory.

I have checked RAM and changed the HD with no success.
Experimenting with a lot of different memory settings in the conf-file
didn't help either.
Is there anybody else who experienced this and found a way to create this
index?
Server is postgres 8.3.9 with 4 GB dedicated RAM.

Thanks
Frans
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