Horton

Re: A qsort template

Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>

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From: Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>
To: Thomas Munro <thomas.munro@gmail.com>
Cc: pgsql-hackers <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>
Date: 2021-02-18T06:02:22Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers 
Hi,

On 2021-02-18 16:09:49 +1300, Thomas Munro wrote:
> In another thread[1], I proposed $SUBJECT, but then we found a better
> solution to that thread's specific problem.  The general idea is still
> good though: it's possible to (1) replace several existing copies of
> our qsort algorithm with one, and (2) make new specialised versions a
> bit more easily than the existing Perl generator allows.  So, I'm back
> with a rebased stack of patches.  I'll leave specific cases for new
> worthwhile specialisations for separate proposals; I've heard about
> several.

One place that could benefit is the qsort that BufferSync() does at the
start. I tried your patch for that, and it does reduce the sort time
considerably. For 64GB of mostly dirty shared_buffers from ~1.4s to
0.6s.

Now, obviously one can argue that that's not going to be the crucial
spot, and wouldn't be entirely wrong. OTOH, in my AIO branch I see
checkpointer doing ~10GB/s, leading to the sort being a measurable
portion of the overall time.

Greetings,

Andres Freund

Commits

  1. Remove debug messages from tuplesort_sort_memtuples()

  2. Fix performance regression in tuplesort specializations

  3. Fix tuplesort optimization for CLUSTER-on-expression.

  4. Initial pgindent and pgperltidy run for v14.

  5. Specialize checkpointer sort functions.

  6. Use sort_template.h for qsort() and qsort_arg().

  7. Use sort_template.h for qsort_tuple() and qsort_ssup().

  8. Add sort_template.h for making sort functions.

  9. Use abbreviated keys for faster sorting of text datums.