Re: TAP test breakage on MacOS X

Andrew Dunstan <andrew(at)dunslane(dot)net> writes:
> There are other issues. I am not going to enable this in the buildfarm
> until the check test can work from a single install. It's insane for the
> bin tests to take an order of magnitude longer than the main regression
> suite.

I think the installs as such aren't the only reason for the sucky
performance. We need to also reduce the number of initdb cycles incurred
by the TAP tests. It's useless for example that the pg_controldata test
creates its very own $PGDATA rather than sharing one with other tests.

This line of thought implies that the tests will become less independent
of each other, which will probably result in them being a bit harder to
maintain. Still, we are paying an awful lot of cycles for not much, as
things stand at the moment.

A couple other random ideas for shaving cycles:

* Use initdb -N (no fsync) where we do need to initdb.

* We probably don't need a full install tree for these types of tests;
it's tempting for instance to omit installing the include/ tree. That
wouldn't save a large number of megabytes but it is a sizable number of
files, so it might cut the install/rm -rf time noticeably.

* In the same line, suppressing install of the timezone database file
tree would possibly save a useful number of cycles. We do need to have
that data for functionality, but buildfarm owners could be encouraged
to use --with-system-tzdata to shave install cycles.

regards, tom lane