Myron Scott <mkscott@sacadia.com> writes:
> Another suggestion might be to create a global hashtable that stores
> the size and pointer to global structures for each subsection. Each
> subsection can define its own globals structure and register them with
> the hashtable.
Hmm ... now *that* is an interesting idea.
With a little more intelligence in the manager of this table, this could
also solve my concern about pointer variables. Perhaps the entries
could include not just address/size but some type information. If the
manager knows "this variable is a pointer to a palloc'd string" then it
could do the Right Thing during fork. Not sure offhand what the
categories would need to be, but we could derive those if anyone has
cataloged the variables that get passed down from postmaster to children.
I don't think it needs to be a hashtable --- you wouldn't ever be doing
lookups in it, would you? Just a simple list of things-to-copy ought to
do fine.
regards, tom lane