Hi Greg & others. I run this on a 4 cpu smp box (Dell PE6650+EMC AX100) so I already offload pg_dump, gzip and split to other cpu's. Top confirms this: postmaster = 95% cpu ie. it uses one cpu completely. Unless I can get postmaster to do less work (that's what I'm looking for) or run multiple threads (not likely) that's about the best I can get.
The job is clearly cpu bound in the postmaster process.
Hmmm, when I upgraded my Opteron box to 64-bit linux, my dump->gzip ran twice as fast which told me the gzip was a bit part of the CPU usage. Dunno what else you can do to make it run faster. My backups -- even on 64-bit -- still take 20 minutes on a 30GB DB.
I'm a bit reluctant to go into the snapshot option You outline. It looks a bit tricky but if no other options are on hand then I'll have to bite the bullet.
Snapshot is much easier if you use LVM. No need to do any postgres trickery. Just freeze the volume at the kernel level.
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