Poor pg_dump performance

First, sorry if this has been answered before; the list search seems to
be down...

This is on a quad Xeon-PII 450 machine running FBSD 4.8.

84386 pgsql     64   0   104M    99M RUN    1  78:20 61.87% 61.87% postgres
84385 decibel   64   0  3748K  2268K CPU1   3  49:49 37.79% 37.79% pg_dump

(note that the CPU percents are per-cpu, so 100% would be 100% of one
CPU)

According to vmstat, there's very little disk I/O, so that's not a
bottleneck. The command I used was:

pg_dump -vFc -f pgsql-20030906.cdb stats

It should be compressing, but if that was the bottleneck, shouldn't the
pg_dump process be at 100% CPU? It does seem a bit coincidental that the
two procs seem to be taking 100% of one CPU (top shows them running on
different CPUs though).

This is version 7.3.4.
--
Jim C. Nasby, Database Consultant                  jim@nasby.net
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