Fastest Backup & Restore for perf testing

Hi,

I’m running performance tests against a PostgreSQL database (9.4) with various hardware configurations and a couple different benchmarks (TPC-C & TPC-H).

I’m currently using pg_dump and pg_restore to refresh my dataset between runs but this process seems slower than it could be.

Is it possible to do a tar/untar of the entire /var/lib/pgsql tree as a backup & restore method?

If not, is there another way to restore a dataset more quickly? The database is dedicated to the test dataset so trashing & rebuilding the entire application/OS/anything is no issue for me—there’s no data for me to lose.

Thanks!

Wes Vaske | Senior Storage Solutions Engineer

Micron Technology

101 West Louis Henna Blvd, Suite 210 | Austin, TX 78728