It turns out that pgdump command is sensitive to latency between pgdump and postgresql database.

Some time ago I was trying to download database from (literally) other side od the world --- and I noticed that pgdump was just staling. Download of very small database (couple of megabytes) took about an hour.

It turns out that the problem was latency between computer running pgdump and the database itself, pgdump is doing a lot od requests that look like that:

• Request some information about a relation (be it table, index, ...)
• Wait until you get an answer.

There is at least 7 round trips per table, so downloading empty table with one second round-trip latency takes 7 seconds at least.