Re: pg_restore -j <nothing>

On Thursday 23 April 2009 01:26:04 Alvaro Herrera wrote:
> I just noticed (!) that Make accepts an argument-less -j option, which
> it takes to mean "use as many parallel jobs as possible". As far as I
> see in our pg_restore code, we don't even accept an argumentless -j
> option; was this deviation from the Make precedent on purpose, or were
> we just not following Make at all on this?

There was likely no strong intention to follow make on this. A small problem
would be that getopt doesn't portably support single-letter options with
optional arguments.

The main problem, however, is that make -j is pretty useless and dangerous.
Using it on a large parallel-make-safe project can easily lock up (thrash)
your machine. make -j together with -l (--load-average) is kind of useful, I
guess, but exactly how "load average" translated to a PostgreSQL database
system is to be determined.