Re: 7 hrs for a pg_restore?

[Jeff Davis <pgsql(at)j-davis(dot)com>]

On Tue, 2008-02-19 at 13:03 -0500, Douglas J Hunley wrote:
> I spent a whopping seven hours restoring a database late Fri nite for a 
> client. We stopped the application, ran pg_dump -v -Ft -b -o $db > 
> ~/pre_8.3.tar on the 8.2.x db, and then upgrading the software to 8.3. I then 
> did a pg_restore -v -d $db ./pre_8.3.tar and watched it positively crawl.
> I'll grant you that it's a 5.1G tar file, but 7 hours seems excessive. 
> 

Are there lots of indexes on localized text attributes? If you have a
big table with localized text (e.g. en_US.UTF-8), it can take a long
time to build the indexes. If the file is 5GB compressed, I wouldn't be
surprised if it took a long time to restore.

Keep in mind, if you have several GB worth of indexes, they take up
basically no space in the logical dump (just the "CREATE INDEX" command,
and that's it). But they can take a lot of processor time to build up
again, especially with localized text.

Regards,
	Jeff Davis