Re: 8.04 and RedHat/CentOS init script issue and sleep

Andrew Dunstan <andrew(at)dunslane(dot)net> writes:
> Tom Lane wrote:
>> In short: pg_timezone_initialize() took about 8.2 seconds out of the
>> total time of 8.73 seconds.

> Further data points:

> I just observed this taking over 20 seconds on my clunky old pII 266.
> That's really horrible. But pg_ctl -w start was able to complete in
> about 2 seconds.

Yeah. I've been experimenting here, and it's clear that strace itself
adds huge overhead --- on my machine, postmaster start is normally well
under a second, but strace'ing it brings it to about 8 seconds. No
doubt that's because of all the stat("/etc/localtime") calls it has to
trace.

So there's some Heisenberg effect here. However, I don't think there
can be much doubt that on a machine that is just booting (and has
surely got none of these files in cache) the search through
share/postgresql/timezone could take a few seconds. Hindsight is
always 20/20 ;-)

regards, tom lane