Re: slowest tap tests - split or accelerate?

Hi,

On 2022-01-19 11:54:01 -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de> writes:
> > On 2022-01-18 13:40:40 -0800, Andres Freund wrote:
> >> Maybe we really should do at least the most simplistic caching for initdbs, by
> >> doing one initdb as part of the creation of temp_install. Then Cluster::init
> >> would need logic to only use that if $params{extra} is empty.
>
> > I hacked this together. And the wins are bigger than I thought.
>
> Me too ;-).  As I remarked earlier, I'd tried this once before and
> gave up because it didn't seem to be winning much.  But that was
> before we had so many initdb's triggered by TAP tests, I think.

What approach did you use? Do you have a better idea than generating
tmp_install/initdb_template?

I for a bit wondered whether initdb should do this internally instead. But it
seemed more work than I wanted to tackle.

The bit in the patch about generating initdb_template in Install.pm definitely
needs to be made conditional, but I don't precisely know on what. The
buildfarm just calls it as
  perl install.pl "$installdir


> So this looks like it'll be a nice win for low-end hardware, too.

Nice!


> (Note that all four runs have the "fsync = on" removed from
> 008_fsm_truncation.pl.)

I assume you're planning on comitting that?

Greetings,

Andres Freund