Our biggest table contains raw image data in form of a bytea column.
When we did a simple COPY from psql on this table to stdout, it was quite fast (1 or 2 minutes), but it was very slow with the pg_dump. It took ~60 minutes.
So investigating this I stumbled across this discussion. It seems that the pg_dump compression is rather slow if data is already compressed as it is with image data in a bytea format. And it is better to compress outside of pg_dump (-Z0).
Additionally we found that we can make use of our multi-core cpu (-j 10 and pigz -p 10 to use 10 cores. you might select a different number of cores).
So now we are doing it like this: