On Wed, Jun 14, 2006 at 02:11:19PM -0400, John Vincent wrote: > Out of curiosity, does anyone have any idea what the ratio of actual > datasize to backup size is if I use the custom format with -Z 0 compression > or the tar format?
-Z 0 should mean no compression.
But the custom format is still a binary backup, no?
Something you can try is piping the output of pg_dump to gzip/bzip2. On some OSes, that will let you utilize 1 CPU for just the compression. If you wanted to get even fancier, there is a parallelized version of bzip2 out there, which should let you use all your CPUs.
Or if you don't care about disk IO bandwidth, just compress after the fact (though, that could just put you in a situation where pg_dump becomes bandwidth constrained).
Unfortunately if we working with our current source box, the 1 CPU is already the bottleneck in regards to compression. If I run the pg_dump from the remote server though, I might be okay.
