Re: Dumping/Restoring with constraints?

On Wed, Aug 27, 2008 at 10:34 PM, Bill Moran
<wmoran(at)collaborativefusion(dot)com> wrote:
>>
>>
>> Dumb question. Will this kind of pg_dumpall lead to downtime, I mean
>> is there a database lock during this time?
>
> No.

Thanks. But there seems to be a tangible slowdown of DB operations
during the time that pg_dump is running. Perhaps some of my
postgresql.conf variables are not geared to this. (I vaguely recall
setting it up so that the wal_buffers or checkpoint_segments needed to
be set upwards for maintenance tasks).

My question: is it possible to interactively set up these variables so
that pg_dumpall can work very fast? And behind the scenes, without
slowing stuff down?

Thanks