On Thu, Apr 6, 2017 at 7:04 PM, Michael Harris <harmic@gmail.com> wrote:
Hello,
Back in pg 9.2, we hacked a copy of pg_basebackup to add a command line option which would allow the user to specify an arbitrary external program (potentially including arguments) to be used to compress the tar backup.
Our motivation was to be able to use pigz (parallel gzip implementation) to speed up the compression. It also allows using tools like bzip2, xz, etc instead of the inbuilt zlib.
I never ended up submitting that upstream, but now it looks like I will have to repeat the exercise for 9.6, so I was wondering if such a feature would be welcomed.
I would welcome it. I would really like to be able to use parallel pigz and pxz.
You can stream the data into a compression tool of your choice as long as you use tar mode and specify '-D -', but that is incompatible with table spaces, and with xlog streaming, and so is not a very good solution.
