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