pg_dump and very slow database

[James Neff <jneff@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Greetings,

I started a process last night that is reading records from one table, 
applying some business rules (validation) and then moving some data to 
another table.

I had a cron job which I forgot about that ran last night too.  This 
simply executes pg_dump :

/usr/local/pgsql/bin/pg_dump -U postgres -b -f 
/home/backup/postgres_db/mydatabase.pgd -Fc mydatabase

The backup has been running for more than 140 minutes, according to 
"ps".  The processing of the records is still going but it is very slow 
compared to when I first started it.  I suspect there to be a problem 
with running my process and this backup running at the same time.  The 
"locks" tab on the pgAdmin Server Status screen is full of locks for the 
pg_dump command.

I do not have to have this backup done now, I can run it later today 
manually.

Is it safe for me to just "kill -9" the pg_dump process?  Or is there a 
more graceful way to stop the pg_dump process.


Thanks in advance,
James