Re: Backup is too slow

CPU may be thottled because it's performing the backup, gzip and split
all at once. May I suggest this.

/home/postgres/postgresql/bin/pg_dump -h <hostname> --compress=9 -f
dumpfile.gz $1
split --bytes 500m dumpfile.gz dumpfile.gz.

If that takes too long or clobbers the system...

/home/postgres/postgresql/bin/pg_dump -h <hostname> -f dumpfile $1
gzip -9 dumpfile.gz
split --bytes 500m dumpfile.gz dumpfile.gz.

Another variation may be the same as above except scp/rcp/ftp the
uncompressed dump to another idle server that performs the compress
and split for you.

One last way is to take a filesystem snapshot if your filesystem
permits it. Since postgres stops/starts so nicely, we offline ours
when it's idle and just long enough to execute the filesystem snapshot
then bring it back online immediately after. I suppose you could, in
theory, wait till idle and request a lock on all necessary tables,
perform a checkpoint, filesystem snapshot, then release the locks.
I'm sure Tom, Josh or someone more in the know would have imput for
this option.

Greg

-----Original Message-----
From: John Jensen [mailto:JRJ(at)ft(dot)fo]
Sent: Tuesday, December 07, 2004 6:48 AM
To: pgsql-admin(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: [ADMIN] Backup is too slow

Hi all,
I'm a bit unhappy with the time it takes to do backup of my PG7.4.6
base.
I have 13GB under the pg/data dir and it takes 30 minutes to do the
backup.

Using top and iostat I've figured out that the backup job is cpu bound
in the postmaster process. It eats up 95% cpu while the disk is at 10%
load. In fact I'm able to compress the backup file (using gzip) faster
(35 % cpu load) than the backend can deliver it.

The operating requirements is 24/7 so I can't just take the base
offline and do a file copy. I can do backup that way in 5-6 minutes
BTW.

Would it speed up the process if I did a binary backup instead ?
Are there any other fun tricks to speed up things ?

I run on a four way Linux box and it's not in production yet so there
is no cpu shortage.

The backup script is:

#! /bin/sh
if test $# -lt 2; then
echo "Usage: dbbackup <basename> <filename>"
else
/home/postgres/postgresql/bin/pg_dump -h <hostname> $1 | gzip -f - |
split --bytes 500m - $2.
fi

And the restore script:

#! /bin/sh
if test $# -lt 2; then
echo "Usage: dbrestore <basename> <filename>"
else
cat $2.* | gzip -d -f - | /home/postgres/postgresql/bin/psql -h
<hostname> -f - $1
fi

Cheers,

John

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