>> Theory B would be that there's some huge overhead in calling non-built-in
>> functions on your platform. We do know that looking up a "C" function is
>> significantly more expensive than looking up a "builtin" function, but
>> there should only be half a dozen such calls involved in this test case;
>> it's hard to credit that that takes 200 msec. Does the time drop at all
>> on second and subsequent repetitions in a single backend run?
>
>
> Yes, it drops from about .680ms to the .250ish that I posted.
>
> I suppose I should try compiling this little stub into postgres, eh?
What if you try the new preload_libraries (or whatever it's called)
config variable in postgresql.conf in the 7.4 release?
Chris