Hi,
For performance reasons (obviously ;)) I'm experimenting with parallel restore 
in PG 8.4. I grabbed the latest source snapshot (of today, March 30) and 
compiled this with zlib support. I dumped a DB from PG 8.3.5 (using maximum 
compression). I got this message however:
postg...@mymachine:/home/henk/postgresql-8.4/bin$ time
./pg_restore -p 5434 -h localhost -U henk -d db_test -j 8 -Fc
/home/henk/test-databases/dumps/db_test.custom
pg_restore: [archiver] WARNING: archive is compressed, but this
installation does not support compression -- no data will be available
pg_restore: [archiver] cannot restore from compressed archive (compression
not supported in this installation)

So initially it seemed its only possible to do a pg_restore using the 
uncompressed pg_dump custom format. So I tried the uncompressed dump, but this 
too failed. This last part was a little problematic anyway, since pg_dump 
absolutely wants to read its input from a file and does not accept any input 
from stdin. I assume reading from a file is necessary for the multiple parallel 
processes to each read their own part of the file, something which might be 
difficult to do when reading from stdin.
Apart from the fact that it simply doesn't work for me at the moment, I see a 
major problem with this approach though. Dumping in the custom format (option 
-Fc) is far slower than dumping in the plain format. Even if the parallel 
restore would speed up things, then the combined time of a dump and restore 
would still be negatively affected when compared to doing a plain dump and 
restore. I'm aware of the fact that I might be hitting some bugs, as a 
development snapshot is by definition of course not stable. Also, perhaps I'm 
missing something.
My question is thus; could someone advise me how to get parallel restore to 
work and how to speed up a dump in the custom file format?
Many thanks in advance


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