PG engine takeover or switch over

Hi,

I am looking for some suggestions to optimize the following
problem/solution.

Given two nodes A and B (two computers) in a active-passive mode where A is
running PG engine, and B is simply standing by, and a common storage
(twin tailed) ( or from pg_ctl point of view -D /common/data ), I am looking
for a faster solution during the takeover where A has crashed and B is to
start PG engine and run with it.

My current solution is to start PG engine which should take little time to
study the configuration files and /common/data and fork a few childrens. But
I am still interested in optimizing this start-up cost.

For example, would I gain anything by starting PG engine on both A and B,
but on B I point it to /common/dummy and during the takeover, I somehow tell
it to now read from /common/data, for example have two postmaster.conf or
PGDATA and then use pg_ctl reload.

Thanks
Medi