RE: pg_basebackup inconsistent performance

Is the backup server shared among other systems..?
No, physical system

And there's no increased activity on the backup server either?
No

Have you looked at network traffic for the duration? And/or disk i/o on each system? If you ran a backup once and then immediately after and that's the 'fast' case then you may be seeing performance be better due to a lot of data being in the filesystem cache. pg_basebackup being single-threaded probably doesn't help here either, you might want to consider one of the parallel-backup options.

Yes, looked at all the system stats, nothing changed, just the backups running extremely long.

Was looking into pgbackrest, just haven't gotten it configured yet

-----Original Message-----
From: Stephen Frost <sfrost(at)snowman(dot)net>
Sent: Wednesday, May 6, 2020 12:30 PM
To: Jasen Lentz <jlentz(at)sescollc(dot)com>
Cc: Adrian Klaver <adrian(dot)klaver(at)aklaver(dot)com>; pgsql-general(at)lists(dot)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: Re: pg_basebackup inconsistent performance

Greetings,

* Jasen Lentz (jlentz(at)sescollc(dot)com) wrote:
> Where are the machines you are backing up from/to relative to each on the network?
> Direct ethernet connection between 10G network interfaces

Is the backup server shared among other systems..?

> Is there increased activity on the database servers e.g. inserts, updates, etc during the extended backups?
> Not according to sar reports

And there's no increased activity on the backup server either?

Have you looked at network traffic for the duration? And/or disk i/o on each system? If you ran a backup once and then immediately after and that's the 'fast' case then you may be seeing performance be better due to a lot of data being in the filesystem cache. pg_basebackup being single-threaded probably doesn't help here either, you might want to consider one of the parallel-backup options.

Thanks,

Stephen