Re: slowest tap tests - split or accelerate?

Andres Freund <andres(at)anarazel(dot)de> writes:
> I've occasionally pondered caching initdb results and reusing them across
> tests - just the locking around it seems a bit nasty, but perhaps that could
> be done as part of the tmp_install step. Of course, it'd need to deal with
> different options etc...

I'd actually built a prototype to do that, based on making a reference
cluster and then "cp -a"'ing it instead of re-running initdb. I gave
up when I found than on slower, disk-bound machines it was hardly
any faster. Thinking about it now, I wonder why not just re-use one
cluster for many tests, only dropping and re-creating the database
in which the testing happens.

regards, tom lane