Re: Slow backups over VPN

[Steve Crawford <scrawford@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 04/29/2014 11:13 AM, Rob Richardson wrote:

I have a tiny database that I need to take frequent backups of.  The database is on a test server in our office.  When I’m at the office, backups take only a few seconds.  But when I am working from home, connecting to the office through a SonicWall VPN, backups take a few minutes.  Other data transfer operations, like file copies, are reasonably fast.  I’ve seen this behavior for databases using PostgreSQL8.4, 9.0 and 9.3.  Can you suggest any way that I might get backups to be reasonably fast?

Depends on the values of "tiny", "reasonably fast", the type of dump you are doing, etc. It's not surprising that your (gigabit?) office network performs better than a VPN connection from home.

I'd try dumping to a file (your few-second dump) and look at the file-size compared to your reasonably-fast transferring files to see if it's simply a data-size issue which I suspect though it is, I suppose, possible that there is a latency or other issue.

If you are doing a plain pg_dump the output is uncompressed text. You could use one of the compressed formats or do a dump->compress->transfer.

N.B.: If you use a compressed format the compression happens in the pg_dump client, *not* in the server. So using a compressed format will not help if your dump client is at home and the server is at the other end of the VPN. You must compress the data at the office side of the connection.

Cheers,
Steve