PostgreSQL: improving pg_dump, pg_restore performance

Question

When I began, I used pg_dump with the default plain format. I was unenlightened.

Research revealed to me time and file size improvements with pg_

Answer 1

As you may have guessed simply by the fact that compressing the backup results in faster performance, your backup is I/O bound. This should come as no surprise as backup is pretty much always going to be I/O bound. Compressing the data trades I/O load for CPU load, and since most CPUs are idle during monster data transfers, compression comes out as a net win.

So, to speed up backup/restore times, you need faster I/O. Beyond reorganizing the database to not be one huge single instance, that's pretty much all you can do.