Re: configuring timezone

Thank you for explaining.

Regards,
Igor Neyman

________________________________________
From: Tom Lane [tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us]
Sent: Wednesday, February 06, 2013 5:11 PM
To: Igor Neyman
Cc: Adrian Klaver; pgsql-general(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: Re: [GENERAL] configuring timezone

Igor Neyman <ineyman(at)perceptron(dot)com> writes:
> Going back to the reason for this change in Release Notes:
> "This avoids expensive time zone probes during server start."
> How expensive?

The time zone probe logic involves reading every file under
/usr/share/zoneinfo (or wherever you have the Olson tz database
installed). There are a couple thousand of those in a typical Linux
installation. In a cold-boot situation where none of that data is
already swapped in, it's not unusual for this to take five seconds or
more. Now that may or may not seem like a lot, but it's more than
enough to cause many startup scripts to conclude that the postmaster has
failed. The hacks we'd built up to deal with this eventually became
insupportable.

We're not going back. I suggest you consider ways to adjust your
server-migration process.

regards, tom lane