"John E. Vincent" <pgsql-performance@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > I've watched the backup process and I/O is not a problem. Memory isn't a > problem either. It seems that we're CPU bound but NOT in I/O wait. Is it the pg_dump process, or the connected backend, that's chewing the bulk of the CPU time? (This should be pretty obvious in "top".) If it's the pg_dump process, the bulk of the CPU time is likely going into compression --- you might consider backing off the compression level, perhaps --compress=1 or even 0 if size of the dump file isn't a big concern. Another possibility if your LAN is reasonably fast is to run pg_dump on a different machine, so that you can put two CPUs to work. regards, tom lane
