> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bruce Momjian [mailto:pgman@candle.pha.pa.us]
> Sent: Monday, June 17, 2002 6:20 PM
> To: Dann Corbit
> Cc: Jan Wieck; Peter Eisentraut; PostgreSQL-development
> Subject: Re: [HACKERS] Roadmap for a Win32 port
>
>
> Dann Corbit wrote:
> > > > It will be at least another copy of the postmaster (dot exe).
> > >
> > > Yea, I just liked the idea of the postmaster binary
> somehow reporting
> > > the postmaster status. Seems it is in a better position to
> > > do that than
> > > a shell script.
> >
> > Architectural notion:
> > The Postmaster is about 100x bigger than it needs to be.
> >
> > The Postmaster needs to set up shared memory and launch servers. It
> > does not need to know anything about SQL grammar or any of that
> > rigamarole.
> >
> > It could be a 15K executable.
> >
> > Why not have an itty-bitty Postmaster that does nothing but
> a spawn or a
> > create process to create threaded Postgres instances?
>
> Can't. postmaster/postgres are symlinks to the same file,
> and we fork()
> from postmaster to create backends. All the code has to be in the
> postmaster so the fork works.
Is fork() faster than creation of a new process via exec()? After the
creation of the shared memory, the information needed to use it could be
passed to the Postgres servers on the command line.
The startup stuff for PostgreSQL is just a few files. It does not seem
insurmountable to change it. But it is none of my business. If it is a
major hassle (for reasons which I am not aware) then I see no driving
reason to change it.