In my experience the wisdom "GIN is slower to update than GiST" is mostly obsolete nowadays. At least that's what my benchmark results suggest http://blog.pgadd

In my experience the wisdom "GIN is slower to update than GiST" is mostly obsolete nowadays. At least that's what my benchmark results suggest http://blog.pgaddict.com/posts/performance-since-postgresql-7-4-to-9-4-fulltext http://blog.pgaddict.com/posts/performance-since-postgresql-... It's also a bit shortsighted to look at the index maintenance in isolation - when your workload is 99% reads, and queries with GIN indexes are way faster, it's probably more efficient to use GIN indexes. Moreover, there are often more expensive parts when inserting/updating data (either inside the database, or in the application), so the index maintenance is not really the main problem. I'm sure there are workloads where it's still true, though.