I'd also add: run pg_tune on your server. Made a *dramatic* difference for us.
On Friday, February 25, 2011 05:26:56 am Vick Khera wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 24, 2011 at 6:38 PM, Aleksey Tsalolikhin
>
> <atsaloli.tech@gmail.com> wrote:
> > In practice, if I pg_dump our 100 GB database, our application, which
> > is half Web front end and half OLTP, at a certain point, slows to a
> > crawl and the Web interface becomes unresponsive. I start getting
> > check_postgres complaints about number of locks and query lengths. I
> > see locks around for over 5 minutes.
>
> I'd venture to say your system does not have enough memory and/or disk
> bandwidth, or your Pg is not tuned to make use of enough of your
> memory. The most likely thing is that you're saturating your disk
> I/O.
>
> Check the various system statistics from iostat and vmstat to see what
> your baseline load is, then compare that when pg_dump is running. Are
> you dumping over the network or to the local disk as well?
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