Karl Wright <kwright(at)metacarta(dot)com> writes:
> (a) How do I get around the "out of memory" error for pg_restore?
Does this table have foreign key constraints? I imagine you're running
out of space for the deferred-trigger list.
> (b) How can I get the restore performance up to the level where it takes
> only a couple of hours at most to do this restore?
For both this and (a), the main thing is "avoid data-only restores".
Read
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.2/static/populate.html
particularly the last section about making efficient use of pg_dump.
regards, tom lane