On 08.09.21 21:07, Andres Freund wrote:
> There of course is historical raisins for things happening in initdb - the
> setup logic didn't use to be C. But now that it is C, it seems a bit absurd to
> read bootstrap data in initdb, write the data to a pipe, and then read it
> again in the backend. It for sure doesn't make things faster.
A couple of things I was looking into a while ago: We could probably
get a bit of performance by replacing the line-by-line substitutions
(replace_token()) by processing the whole buffer at once. And we could
get even more performance by not doing any post-processing of the files
at all. For example, we don't need to replace_token() SIZEOF_POINTER,
which is known at compile time. Handling ENCODING, LC_COLLATE, etc. is
not quite as obvious, but moving some of that logic into the backend
could be helpful in that direction.