Re: Fastest Backup & Restore for perf testing

> On May 27, 2015, at 1:24 PM, Wes Vaske (wvaske) <wvaske(at)micron(dot)com> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I’m running performance tests against a PostgreSQL database (9.4) with various hardware configurations and a couple different benchmarks (TPC-C & TPC-H).
>
> I’m currently using pg_dump and pg_restore to refresh my dataset between runs but this process seems slower than it could be.
>
> Is it possible to do a tar/untar of the entire /var/lib/pgsql tree as a backup & restore method?
>
> If not, is there another way to restore a dataset more quickly? The database is dedicated to the test dataset so trashing & rebuilding the entire application/OS/anything is no issue for me—there’s no data for me to lose.
>

Dropping the database and recreating it from a template database with "create database foo template foo_template" is about as fast as a file copy, much faster than pg_restore tends to be.

Cheers,
Steve