Hi All, I'm looking for advice for optimizing the pg_dump portion of "pg_upgrade --link". Since this schema only dump can't take advantage of parallel processing with jobs I'm looking for any preparation or configuration settings that can improve speed. 9.2 to 9.6 CentOS 6/64bit 512GB I see only one CPU of 32 doing anything and it's often at 100%. Disk IO is minimal. Memory use varies but always plenty to spare. During upgrade I'm running: Only the upgrade - no other services work_mem = 50MB maintenance_work_mem = 2048MB shared_buffers = 30GB max_locks_per_transaction = 4096 autovacuum = off autovacuum_freeze_max_age = 1500000000 #Had previous issues with vacuum (to prevent wrap) Truthfully, I thought I had increased work_mem until starting this email. But increasing it is just a guess unless I get advice to do so here. I'm at a knowledge level where I can only guess at the relevance of vacuum, analyze or any other preparatory actions I can complete before taking postgres offline for upgrade. My feeling is that the bottleneck is the backend and not pg_dump. School me on that if needed please. Any advice and explanation is appreciated. - Senor