Gurjeet Singh wrote:
Seems like it would improve performance in general, but more so under load conditions when you actually need it. I am not sure if -depth option is supported by all incarnations of 'find'.

Given the way directory writes are cached by the filesystem, I'm not sure why the load at the time matters so much. If what you mean by that is you're low on memory, that would make more sense to me.

Anyway, "-depth" is in POSIX as of 2001. It seems to be in all the major SysV UNIX variants going back further then that, and of course it's in GNU find. But it looks like BSD derived systems from before that POSIX standard originally called this "-d" instead. So there's some potential for this to not work on older systems; it works fine on my test FreeBSD 7.2 system. Maybe someone who has access to some ancient BSD-ish system can try this out? The simplest test case similar to what the patch adds seems to be if this runs, returning subdirectories in depth-first order before their parent:

$ find / -depth -type d -print

If that fails somewhere, it may turn out to require another configure check just to determine whether you can use this configuration time optimization. That's certainly possible to add to the patch if it got committed and turns out to break one of the buildfarm members. It seems to me like this whole thing may be a bit more work than it's worth, given this is a fairly small and difficult to reproduce speedup in only one stage of the build process. I'd think that if configure takes longer than it has to because the system is heavily loaded, the amount compilation time is going to suffer from that would always dwarf this component of total build time. But if this was slow enough at some point to motivate you to write a patch for it, maybe that assumption is wrong.

--
Greg Smith   2ndQuadrant US    g...@2ndquadrant.com   Baltimore, MD
PostgreSQL Training, Services and Support        www.2ndQuadrant.us



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