Andres Freund:
FWIW, dynamic linking has a noticeable overhead on other platforms too. A
non-dependencies-enabled postgres can do about 2x the connections-per-second
than a fully kitted out postgres can (basically due to more memory mapping
metadata being copied). But on windows the overhead is larger because so much
more happens for every new connections, including loading all dlls from
scratch.
I suspect linking a few libraries statically would be quite worth it on
windows. On other platforms it'd be quite inadvisable to statically link
libraries, due to security updates, [...]
That's not necessarily true. The nix package manager and thus NixOS
track all dependencies for a piece of software. If any of the
dependencies are updated, all dependents are rebuilt, too. So the
security concern doesn't apply here. There is a "static overlay", which
builds everything linked fully statically. Unfortunately, PostgreSQL
doesn't build in that, so far.
Lately, I have been looking into building at least libpq in that static
overlay, via Meson. There are two related config options:
-Ddefault_library=shared|static|both
-Dprefer_static
The first controls which libraries (libpq, ...) to build ourselves. The
second controls linking, IIUC also against external dependencies.
Maybe it would be a first step to support -Dprefer_static?
Then this could be set on Windows.
Best,
Wolfgang
