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.
