Benjamin Arai <me@benjaminarai.com> writes:
> It appears that the ORDER BY rank operation is the slowing factor.
> If I remove it then the query is pretty fast. Is there another way
> to perform ORDER BY such that it does not do a sort?
I think you misunderstood: it's not the sort that's slow, it's the
computation of the rank() values that are inputs to the sort.
regards, tom lane