I read in the pg_dump man page that pg_dump does not block other users
accessing the database (readers or writers).
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've had to abort pg_dump as it made the system unusable.
Can I pg_dump without breaking the system?
Best,
-at
