Re: Handling load of servers during backups

[Eric Pailleau]

Hi Edke,

In addition to Martin, (sorry not related to monit), you can tell postgresql 
that a backup
is currently running, by a simple pg_start_backup('ID')/pg_stop_backup() 
functions into postgresql.

The postgresql system, in such case, do not change files on disk but only the 
transaction log.
This allow to do a consistent rsnaphot/rsync.
After receiving pg_stop_backup(), the transaction log is dump into database 
files .

pg_dump is a heavy CPU consumming process, especially when compressing, even 
with  'nice' and 'ionice' .

Hope it can help.
Regards.
Eric