Perhaps a RAM DISK could be considered in the equation
On Thu, 2012-03-15 at 16:30 +0100, Albe Laurenz wrote:
> Richard Harley wrote:
> > Very simple question - does pg_dump/dumpall hit the server in terms
> of database performance? We
> > currently do nightly backups and I want to move to hourly backups but
> not at the expense of hogging
> > all the resources for 5 mins.
> >
> > Pg_dumpall is currently producing a 1GB file - that's the combined
> size of around 30 databases and it
> > takes around 5 mins to run.
>
> pg_dump will be a performance hit, because it consumes disk I/O
> capacity.
> You could measure how the system is affected by your current backup.
>
> On the other hand, instead of doing an hourly pg_dump, it might be
> preferable to do a filesystem backup and PITR. That way you have to
> do a backup only once a day (or week, depends how much traffic you have
> and how fast you have to restore) and can still recover to an
> arbitrary point in time.
>
> Yours,
> Laurenz Albe
>
