The pg_upgrade --jobs option is not passed as an argument when it calls pg_dump. I haven't found anything in docs or forums mentioning a reason for not supporting under certain circumstances other than possibly for pre-9.2. The pg_upgrade docs page states that it allows multiple CPUs to be used for dump and reload of schemas. Some databases I'm upgrading have 500,000+ tables and running with a single process is greatly increasing the upgrade time. I am also using the --link option. I have tried "--jobs 20", "--jobs=20", placing this option first and last and many other variations. I am upgrading 9.2.4 to 9.6.12 on CentOS 6. Varying hardware but all with 32+ CPU cores. su - postgres -c "/usr/pgsql-9.6/bin/pg_upgrade --jobs=20 --link \ --old-bindir=/usr/pgsql-9.2/bin/ \ --new-bindir=/usr/pgsql-9.6/bin/ \ --old-datadir=/var/lib/pgsql/9.2/data/ \ --new-datadir=/var/lib/pgsql/9.6/data/" I feel like there's a simple reason I've missed but this seems pretty straight forward. A secondary plan would be to find instructions for doing the same as "pg_upgrade --link" manually so I can run "pg_dump --jobs 20". Any assist is appreciated. Thanks, S. Cervesa