Architecture

If I understand things right, the postgres process is both a reader and
writer.  Is this right?  If it is, would there be any value in separating
the reader and writer portions of the program?  This is site specific, but
most production environments require far more reading than writing, and this
would allow smaller, faster (perhaps) readers to be started, while only
opening the writers when necessary.  In fact, only one writer could be used,
as a daemon possibly, with perhaps slave writers where viable.
Also, this would allow administrators to further optimise the operation of
the database, and it would be a step closer to a parallel architecture.
Imagine being able to run two servers with readers only, and one server with
a writer, and auxillary reader, all serving up the same database!

By the way, is it possible to run two postgres servers using the same
database shared using NFS or SMB or something?  Probably not, but why not?

I know that a good network comms/signalling library would be needed to do
some of this stuff.  Would it not be worthwhile to try coaxing one of the
open source products (perhaps ACE, I don't know of any others: does it have
a C interface) to supporting all the platforms that PG does?

Any thoughts....


MikeA