[montanalow]

I love the power of the unix shell. find | cat | grep would get the job done just as well if you had all the source in an accessible file tree, but I don't think you'd see any performance increase as the bottleneck is still random reads from EBS.

The single 3k iops EBS volume being used delivers a max theoretical speed of 24MB/s with 8k pages. I'm fine living with 20MB/s in practice.

In fact, postgres does inline (de)compression and optimizes for sequential reads, so it's likely the shell would be slower for this workload given the apples to oranges characteristics. I'd love to see any performance tests making this sort of comparison, they're always educational.