Re: Backup is too slow

"John Jensen" <JRJ(at)ft(dot)fo> writes:
> The job is clearly cpu bound in the postmaster process.

Which part of the dump process is CPU bound --- dumping schema, or data?
(Try enabling log_statement for the pg_dump run and correlating the
appearance of queries in the postmaster log with the CPU usage.)

If it's schema-bound, maybe you need to vacuum/analyze your system
catalogs a bit more aggressively.

If it's data-bound, I'm not sure what you can do other than switch to
datatypes that are cheaper to convert to text form. It would be
interesting to find out where the problem is, though, in case there's
something we can fix for future releases.

regards, tom lane