tuning/profiling

Hi.  I just did some investigation into improving the performance of
the JDBC driver.  I want the best performance for my application, and I
would love to be able to make PostgreSQL more competitive.

I wrote a simple benchmark that would be doing an action common in my
application (fetch ~11000 rows from a table with a date, four
numeric(9,4) columns, and an integer.)  I ran this through a profiler
and found some hot spots.  In the end, I was able to squeeze out at
least 50% improvement with a small amount of changes to driver code.

Before I submit patches, I must run my changes against the test suite
and other benchmarks.  Then I will break my patches into independent
pieces.  Some of my changes may be controversial because they may be
less robust than current, but I am making some assumptions about the
server protocol (like that date strings will never contain Unicode
digits.)

Does anyone have a benchmark they'd like me to run?  I could run
ECPerf, PolePosition, TPC-W, or Jdbcbench.


Ken