`pg_restore` with `jobs` flag results in `pg_restore: error: a worker process died unexpectedly`

I have a script which runs the following:

pg_restore tmp/latest.backup --verbose --clean --no-acl --no-owner --dbname hub_development --jobs=12

This frequently fails with the following error:

error: could not find block ID 4584 in archive -- possibly due to out-of-order restore request, which cannot be handled due to lack of data offsets in archive

pg_restore: error: a worker process died unexpectedly

This error, in turn, means that tables which should have indices, primary keys, etc. end up not having them. For example, when run without multiple cores, our users table looks like this, as expected:

Table "public.users"
       Column       |            Type             | Collation | Nullable |              Default              
--------------------+-----------------------------+-----------+----------+-----------------------------------
 id                 | integer                     |           | not null | nextval('users_id_seq'::regclass)
 created_at         | timestamp without time zone |           | not null | 
 updated_at         | timestamp without time zone |           | not null | 
 email              | character varying           |           | not null | 
 confirmation_token | character varying(128)      |           |          | 
 name               | character varying           |           | not null | ''::character varying
 user_type          | character varying           |           |          | 
 encrypted_password | character varying(128)      |           |          | 
 remember_token     | character varying(128)      |           |          | 
Indexes:
    "users_pkey" PRIMARY KEY, btree (id)
    "index_users_on_email" btree (email)
    "index_users_on_remember_token" btree (remember_token)
Referenced by:
    TABLE "project_feedback_users" CONSTRAINT "fk_rails_08af49ba47" FOREIGN KEY (user_id) REFERENCES users(id)
    TABLE "client_reviews" CONSTRAINT "fk_rails_8fc606dbea" FOREIGN KEY (user_id) REFERENCES users(id)

Wh

UPDATE: the "a worker process died unexpectedly" issue was fixed upstream in PostgreSQL 12.4! Upgrade to get the fix.

For the best compatibility and performance with pg_restore have your pg_dump write the dump file to a local file on disk instead of an unseekable file descriptor.

StackExchange Database Administrators Q#257398, answer score: 7