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

Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.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