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performancepostgresqlbackuprestore
Joe Creighton
Joe Creighton

Reputation: 1222

PostgreSQL: improving pg_dump, pg_restore performance

When I began, I used pg_dump with the default plain format. I was unenlightened.

Research revealed to me time and file size improvements with pg_dump -Fc | gzip -9 -c > dumpfile.gz. I was enlightened.

When it came time to create the database anew,

# create tablespace dbname location '/SAN/dbname';
# create database dbname tablespace dbname;
# alter database dbname set temp_tablespaces = dbname;

% gunzip dumpfile.gz              # to evaluate restore time without a piped uncompression
% pg_restore -d dbname dumpfile   # into a new, empty database defined above

I felt unenlightened: the restore took 12 hours to create the database that's only a fraction of what it will become:

# select pg_size_pretty(pg_database_size('dbname'));
47 GB

Because there are predictions this database will be a few terabytes, I need to look at improving performance now.

Please, enlighten me.

Upvotes: 106

Views: 90469

Answers (7)

Tometzky
Tometzky

Reputation: 23900

I assume you need backup, not a major upgrade of database.

For backup of large databases you should setup continuous archiving instead of pg_dump.

  1. Set up WAL archiving.

  2. Make your base backups for example every day by using

    psql template1 -c "select pg_start_backup('`\`date +%F-%T\``')"
rsync -a --delete /var/lib/pgsql/data/ /var/backups/pgsql/base/
psql template1 -c "select pg_stop_backup()"

A restore would be as simple as restoring database and WAL logs not older than pg_start_backup time from backup location and starting Postgres. And it will be much faster.

Upvotes: 11

michal.jakubeczy
michal.jakubeczy

Reputation: 9469

If you're facing issues with the speed of pg_restore check whether you dumped your data using INSERT or COPY statement.

If you use INSERT (pg_dump is called with --column-inserts parameter) the restore of data would be significantly slower.

Using INSERT is good for making dumps that are loaded into non-Postgres databases. But if you do a restore to Postgres omit using --column-inserts parameter when using pg_dump.

Upvotes: 3

Yanar Assaf
Yanar Assaf

Reputation: 1261

Improve pg dump&restore

PG_DUMP | always use format-directory and -j options

time pg_dump -j 8 -Fd -f /tmp/newout.dir fsdcm_external

PG_RESTORE | always use tuning for postgres.conf and format-directory and -j options

work_mem = 32MB
shared_buffers = 4GB
maintenance_work_mem = 2GB
full_page_writes = off
autovacuum = off
wal_buffers = -1

time pg_restore -j 8 --format=d -C -d postgres /tmp/newout.dir/

Upvotes: 64

richo
richo

Reputation: 8999

zcat dumpfile.gz | pg_restore -d db_name

Removes the full write of the uncompressed data to disk, which is currently your bottleneck.

Upvotes: 8

Ants Aasma
Ants Aasma

Reputation: 54882

First check that you are getting reasonable IO performance from your disk setup. Then check that you PostgreSQL installation is appropriately tuned. In particular shared_buffers should be set correctly, maintenance_work_mem should be increased during the restore, full_page_writes should be off during the restore, wal_buffers should be increased to 16MB during the restore, checkpoint_segments should be increased to something like 16 during the restore, you shouldn't have any unreasonable logging on (like logging every statement executed), auto_vacuum should be disabled during the restore.

If you are on 8.4 also experiment with parallel restore, the --jobs option for pg_restore.

Upvotes: 69

Matthew Wood
Matthew Wood

Reputation: 16417

Two issues/ideas:

  1. By specifying -Fc, the pg_dump output is already compressed. The compression is not maximal, so you may find some space savings by using "gzip -9", but I would wager it's not enough to warrant the extra time (and I/O) used compressing and uncompressing the -Fc version of the backup.

  2. If you are using PostgreSQL 8.4.x you can potentially speed up the restore from a -Fc backup with the new pg_restore command-line option "-j n" where n=number of parallel connections to use for the restore. This will allow pg_restore to load more than one table's data or generate more than one index at the same time.

Upvotes: 14

Will Hartung
Will Hartung

Reputation: 118701

As you may have guessed simply by the fact that compressing the backup results in faster performance, your backup is I/O bound. This should come as no surprise as backup is pretty much always going to be I/O bound. Compressing the data trades I/O load for CPU load, and since most CPUs are idle during monster data transfers, compression comes out as a net win.

So, to speed up backup/restore times, you need faster I/O. Beyond reorganizing the database to not be one huge single instance, that's pretty much all you can do.

Upvotes: 3

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