Re: pg_basebackup is taking more time than expected

Greetings,

Please don't top-post on the PG mailing lists.

* Raghavendra Rao J S V (raghavendrajsv@gmail.com) wrote:
> pg_basebackup utility  depends on which are the parameters?

I'm not sure what you're asking here.

> Is there any possibility to run the pg_basebackup in multi thread?

No, not today.  There's been discussion about making it multi-threaded
but I seriously doubt that'll happen for v11 at this point.

> To improve the speed of the backup of database using pg_basebackup utility
> we shutdown the database and started alone database services. Till that
> time other sevices won't run. We observed some improvement but any other
> things we need to perform to reduce the time taken by the  pg_basebackup
> utility.

Sure, reducing the load of the system might make pg_basebackup a little
faster, but seems unlikely to help it a lot in this case, and it means
you have downtime which might not be ideal.

> We are using below command to take the backup of the database. Any
> improvements to reduce the time taken by backup statement.
>
> $PGHOME/bin/pg_basebackup -p 5433 -U postgres -P -v -x --format=tar --gzip
> --compress=6 --pgdata=- -D /opt/backup_db

Might be faster if you didn't compress it, but, of course, then you
wouldn't have a compressed backup.

This is exactly the kind of issue that lead to the development of
pgBackRest.  Larger databases really do need multi-threaded backups and
there weren't any backup tools for PG which were multi-threaded when we
started.  There's a few other options now, which is good, but
pg_basebackup isn't one of them.

Thanks!

Stephen