locking conflict against concurrent CHECKPOINT that was discussed a few
weeks ago.  Also, if not using WAL archiving (which is always true ATM
but won't be if PITR makes it into this release), there's no need to
WAL-log the index build process; it's sufficient to force-fsync the
completed index before commit.  This seems to gain about a factor of 2
in my tests, which is consistent with writing half as much data.  I did
not try it with WAL on a separate drive though --- probably the gain would
be a lot less in that scenario.