Running Postgres-9.5. I have a large table that I'm doing ALTER TABLE table SET UNLOGGED on. I already dropped all foreign key constraints targeting the table since FK-referred tables can't be unlogged. The query took about 20 minutes and consumed 100% CPU the whole time. I can understand it taking a long time to make a table logged, but making it unlogged doesn't seem difficult... but is it?
Is there anything I could do to make it faster to set a table unlogged?
SET UNLOGGED involves a table rewrite, so for a large table, you can expect it to take quite a while.
As you said, it doesn't seem like making a table UNLOGGED should be that difficult. And simply converting the table isn't that difficult; the complicating factor is the need to make it crash-safe. An UNLOGGED table has an additional file associated with it (the init fork), and there's no way to synchronise the creation of this file with the rest of the commit.
So instead, SET UNLOGGED builds a copy of the table, with an init fork attached, and then swaps in the new relfilenode, which the commit can handle atomically. A more efficient implementation would be possible, but not without changing the representation of unlogged tables (which predate SET UNLOGGED by quite a while) or the logic behind COMMIT itself, both of which were deemed too intrusive for this relatively minor feature. You can read the discussion behind the design on the pgsql-hackers list.
If you really need to minimise downtime, you could take a similar approach to that taken by SET UNLOGGED: create a new UNLOGGED table, copy all of the records across, briefly lock the old table while you sync the last few changes, and swap the new table in with a RENAME when you're done.