Theory B would be that there's some huge overhead in calling non-built-in functions on your platform. We do know that looking up a "C" function is significantly more expensive than looking up a "builtin" function, but there should only be half a dozen such calls involved in this test case; it's hard to credit that that takes 200 msec. Does the time drop at all on second and subsequent repetitions in a single backend run?
Yes, it drops from about .680ms to the .250ish that I posted.
I suppose I should try compiling this little stub into postgres, eh?
What if you try the new preload_libraries (or whatever it's called) config variable in postgresql.conf in the 7.4 release?
Chris
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