Caching jobs

[Shawn Rutledge]

I wonder if one of the worst unaddressed problems with conventional
init scripts is the time it takes to spawn a shell for each one, and
read the script from the disk.  Every time it is necessary to read a
different file than the one you are already reading, there are more
system calls and some seek time on the hard disk.

Has any thought been put into an alternate binary "blob" format for
the entire collection of jobs?  upstart could then read that single
file into memory and blast through all of the jobs without reading
anything else.  The blob should be re-written whenever any of the job
files have been changed (after startup, subscribe for inotify messages
on each job file, perhaps, and do the blob re-writing "nicely" in the
background).