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

I wrote:
> Possibly the glibc boys would listen to a suggestion that strftime()
> need not force the file recheck, but my experience with them is that
> they're relatively impervious to suggestions :-(

I've filed a bug for this:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=171351
so no need for everyone else to do it too ...

> I'm not actually particularly worried about the startup time. What's
> bothering me right at the moment, given the new-found knowledge that
> strftime() is slow on Linux, is that we're using it in elog(). At the
> time that code was written, we did it deliberately to ensure that all
> the backends would write log timestamps in the same timezone regardless
> of local SET TimeZone commands. That's still an important
> consideration, but I wonder whether we don't now have enough timezone
> infrastructure that we could get the same results using pg_strftime.

If glibc fixes the problem upstream then we can leave well enough alone,
but if they indicate they won't then we should think about doing this
someday. The major problem with it probably is "what do you do when
messages need to be emitted before pgtz has been initialized?"

regards, tom lane