Horton

Thread

Commits

  1. Fix missing invalidations for search_path cache.

  2. Optimize SearchPathCache by saving the last entry.

  3. Optimize check_search_path() by using SearchPathCache.

  4. Be more paranoid about OOM in search_path cache.

  5. Add cache for recomputeNamespacePath().

  6. Transform proconfig for faster execution.

  1. Faster "SET search_path"

    Jeff Davis <pgsql@j-davis.com> — 2023-07-29T15:59:01Z

    Improve performance of "SET search_path".

Motivation:

Creating functions with a "SET search_path" clause is safer and more
secure because the function behavior doesn't change based on the
caller's search_path setting.

Setting search_path in the function declaration is especially important
for SECURITY DEFINER functions[1], but even SECURITY INVOKER functions
can be executed more like SECURITY DEFINER in some contexts (e.g.
REINDEX executing an index function). Also, it's just error-prone to
depend on the caller's search_path unless there's a specific reason you
want to do that.

Unfortunately, adding a "SET search_path" clause to functions slows
them down. The attached patches close the performance gap
substantially.

Changes:

0001: Transform the settings in proconfig into a List for faster
processing. This is simple and speeds up any proconfig setting.

0002: Introduce CheckIdentifierString(), which is a faster version of
SplitIdentifierString() that only validates, and can be used in
check_search_path().

0003: Cache of previous search_path settings. The key is the raw
namespace_search_path string and the role OID, and it caches the
computed OID list. Changes to the search_path setting or the role can
retrieve the cached OID list as long as nothing else invalidates the
cache (changes to the temp schema or a syscache invalidation of
pg_namespace or pg_role).

One behavior change in 0003 is that retrieving a cached OID list
doesn't call InvokeNamespaceSearchHook(). It would be easy enough to
disable caching when a hook exists, but I didn't see a reason to expect
that "SET search_path" must invoke that hook each time. Invoking it
when computing for the first time, or after a real invalidation, seemed
fine to me. Feedback on that is welcome.

Test:

  CREATE SCHEMA a;
  CREATE SCHEMA b;
  CREATE TABLE big(i) AS SELECT generate_series(1,20000000);
  VACUUM big; CHECKPOINT;
  CREATE FUNCTION inc(int) RETURNS INT
    LANGUAGE plpgsql
    AS $$ begin return $1+1; end; $$;
  CREATE FUNCTION inc_ab(int) RETURNS INT
    LANGUAGE plpgsql SET search_path = a, b
    AS $$ begin return $1+1; end; $$;

  -- baseline
  EXPLAIN ANALYZE SELECT inc(i) FROM big;

  -- test query
  EXPLAIN ANALYZE SELECT inc_ab(i) FROM big;

Results:

  baseline:          4.3s
  test query:
    without patch:  14.7s
    0001:           13.6s
    0001,0002:      10.4s
    0001,0002,0003:  8.6s

Timings were inconsistent for me so I took the middle of three runs.

It's a lot faster than without the patch. It's still 2X worse than not
specifying any search_path (baseline), but I think it brings it into
"usable" territory for more use cases.

Regards,
	Jeff Davis

[1]
https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql-createfunction.html#SQL-CREATEFUNCTION-SECURITY

  2. Re: Faster "SET search_path"

    Isaac Morland <isaac.morland@gmail.com> — 2023-07-29T16:44:00Z

    On Sat, 29 Jul 2023 at 11:59, Jeff Davis <pgsql@j-davis.com> wrote:

Unfortunately, adding a "SET search_path" clause to functions slows
> them down. The attached patches close the performance gap
> substantially.
>
> Changes:
>
> 0001: Transform the settings in proconfig into a List for faster
> processing. This is simple and speeds up any proconfig setting.
>
> 0002: Introduce CheckIdentifierString(), which is a faster version of
> SplitIdentifierString() that only validates, and can be used in
> check_search_path().
>
> 0003: Cache of previous search_path settings. The key is the raw
> namespace_search_path string and the role OID, and it caches the
> computed OID list. Changes to the search_path setting or the role can
> retrieve the cached OID list as long as nothing else invalidates the
> cache (changes to the temp schema or a syscache invalidation of
> pg_namespace or pg_role).
>

I'm glad to see this work. Something related to consider, not sure if this
is helpful: can the case of the caller's search_path happening to be the
same as the SET search_path setting be optimized? Essentially, "just"
observe efficiently (somehow) that no change is needed, and skip changing
it? I ask because substantially all my functions are written using "SET
search_path FROM CURRENT", and then many of them call each other. As a
result, in my use I would say that the common case is a function being
called by another function, where both have the same search_path setting.
So ideally, the search_path would not be changed at all when entering and
exiting the callee.

  3. Re: Faster "SET search_path"

    Nathan Bossart <nathandbossart@gmail.com> — 2023-07-30T04:51:05Z

    On Sat, Jul 29, 2023 at 08:59:01AM -0700, Jeff Davis wrote:
> 0001: Transform the settings in proconfig into a List for faster
> processing. This is simple and speeds up any proconfig setting.

This looks straightforward.  It might be worth combining the common parts
of ProcessGUCArray() and TransformGUCArray() if there is a clean way to do
so.

> 0002: Introduce CheckIdentifierString(), which is a faster version of
> SplitIdentifierString() that only validates, and can be used in
> check_search_path().

This also looks straightforward.  And I'd make the same comment as above
for SplitIdentifierString() and CheckIdentifierString().  Perhaps we could
have folks set SplitIdentifierString's namelist argument to NULL to
indicate that it only needs to validate.

> 0003: Cache of previous search_path settings. The key is the raw
> namespace_search_path string and the role OID, and it caches the
> computed OID list. Changes to the search_path setting or the role can
> retrieve the cached OID list as long as nothing else invalidates the
> cache (changes to the temp schema or a syscache invalidation of
> pg_namespace or pg_role).

At a glance, this looks pretty reasonable, too.

> One behavior change in 0003 is that retrieving a cached OID list
> doesn't call InvokeNamespaceSearchHook(). It would be easy enough to
> disable caching when a hook exists, but I didn't see a reason to expect
> that "SET search_path" must invoke that hook each time. Invoking it
> when computing for the first time, or after a real invalidation, seemed
> fine to me. Feedback on that is welcome.

Could a previously cached list be used to circumvent a hook that was just
reconfigured to ERROR for certain namespaces?  If something like that is
possible, then we might need to disable the cache when there is a hook.

-- 
Nathan Bossart
Amazon Web Services: https://aws.amazon.com

  4. Re: Faster "SET search_path"

    Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> — 2023-07-31T16:55:22Z

    On Sat, Jul 29, 2023 at 11:59 AM Jeff Davis <pgsql@j-davis.com> wrote:
> Unfortunately, adding a "SET search_path" clause to functions slows
> them down. The attached patches close the performance gap
> substantially.

I haven't reviewed the code but I like the concept a lot. This is badly needed.

-- 
Robert Haas
EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com

  5. Re: Faster "SET search_path"

    Jeff Davis <pgsql@j-davis.com> — 2023-08-01T05:28:31Z

    On Sat, 2023-07-29 at 12:44 -0400, Isaac Morland wrote:
> Essentially, "just" observe efficiently (somehow) that no change is
> needed, and skip changing it?

I gave this a try and it speeds things up some more.

There might be a surprise factor with an optimization like that,
though. If someone becomes accustomed to the function running fast,
then changing the search_path in the caller could slow things down a
lot and it would be hard for the user to understand what happened.

Also, there are a few implementation complexities because I think we
need to still trigger the same invalidation that happens in
assign_search_path().

Regards,
	Jeff Davis

  6. Re: Faster "SET search_path"

    Jeff Davis <pgsql@j-davis.com> — 2023-08-01T23:59:33Z

    On Sat, 2023-07-29 at 21:51 -0700, Nathan Bossart wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 29, 2023 at 08:59:01AM -0700, Jeff Davis wrote:
> > 0001: Transform the settings in proconfig into a List for faster
> > processing. This is simple and speeds up any proconfig setting.
> 
> This looks straightforward.  It might be worth combining the common
> parts
> of ProcessGUCArray() and TransformGUCArray() if there is a clean way
> to do
> so.

I changed the former to call the latter to share code. A few extra
allocations in the ProcessGUCArray() path, but it doesn't look like
that would matter.

> > 0002: Introduce CheckIdentifierString(), which is a faster version
> > of
> > SplitIdentifierString() that only validates, and can be used in
> > check_search_path().
> 
> This also looks straightforward.  And I'd make the same comment as
> above
> for SplitIdentifierString() and CheckIdentifierString().  Perhaps we
> could
> have folks set SplitIdentifierString's namelist argument to NULL to
> indicate that it only needs to validate.

SplitIdentifierString() modifies its input, and it doesn't seem like a
net win in readability if the API sometimes modifies its input
(requiring a copy in the caller) and sometimes does not. I'm open to
suggestion about a refactor here, but I didn't see a clean way to do
so.

> 
> > One behavior change in 0003 is that retrieving a cached OID list
> > doesn't call InvokeNamespaceSearchHook(). It would be easy enough
> > to
> > disable caching when a hook exists, but I didn't see a reason to
> > expect
> > that "SET search_path" must invoke that hook each time. Invoking it
> > when computing for the first time, or after a real invalidation,
> > seemed
> > fine to me. Feedback on that is welcome.
> 
> Could a previously cached list be used to circumvent a hook that was
> just
> reconfigured to ERROR for certain namespaces?  If something like that
> is
> possible, then we might need to disable the cache when there is a
> hook.

I changed it to move the hook so that it's called after retrieving from
the cache. Most of the speedup is still there with no behavior change.
It also means I had to move the deduplication to happen after
retrieving from the cache, which doesn't seem great but in practice the
search path list is not very long so I don't think it will make much
difference. (Arguably, we can do the deduplication before caching, but
I didn't see a big difference so I didn't want to split hairs on the
semantics.)

New timings:

  baseline:          4.2s
  test query:
    without patch:  13.1s
    0001:           11.7s
    0001+0002:      10.5s
    0001+0002+0003:  8.1s

New patches attached.

Regards,
	Jeff Davis

  7. Re: Faster "SET search_path"

    Nathan Bossart <nathandbossart@gmail.com> — 2023-08-02T04:52:33Z

    On Tue, Aug 01, 2023 at 04:59:33PM -0700, Jeff Davis wrote:
> +		List		*pair	 = lfirst(lc);
> +		char		*name	 = linitial(pair);
> +		char		*value	 = lsecond(pair);

This is definitely a nitpick, but this List of Lists business feels strange
to me for some reason.  There might be some code that does this, but I
typically see this done with two ѕeparate lists and forboth().  I doubt it
makes terribly much difference in the end, and I really don't have a strong
opinion either way, but it seemed like something that would inevitably come
up in this thread.  Is there any particular reason you chose to do it this
way?

> SplitIdentifierString() modifies its input, and it doesn't seem like a
> net win in readability if the API sometimes modifies its input
> (requiring a copy in the caller) and sometimes does not. I'm open to
> suggestion about a refactor here, but I didn't see a clean way to do
> so.

That's fine by me.

> +static inline uint32
> +nspcachekey_hash(SearchPathCacheKey *key)
> +{
> +	const unsigned char	*bytes = (const unsigned char *)key->searchPath;
> +	int					 blen  = strlen(key->searchPath);
> +
> +	return hash_bytes(bytes, blen) ^ hash_uint32(key->roleid);
> +}

Any reason not to use hash_combine() here?

> I changed it to move the hook so that it's called after retrieving from
> the cache. Most of the speedup is still there with no behavior change.
> It also means I had to move the deduplication to happen after
> retrieving from the cache, which doesn't seem great but in practice the
> search path list is not very long so I don't think it will make much
> difference. (Arguably, we can do the deduplication before caching, but
> I didn't see a big difference so I didn't want to split hairs on the
> semantics.)

I think you are right.  This adds some complexity, but I don't have
anything else to propose at the moment.

> -		/* Now safe to assign to state variables. */
> -		list_free(baseSearchPath);
> -		baseSearchPath = newpath;
> -		baseCreationNamespace = firstNS;
> -		baseTempCreationPending = temp_missing;
>  	}
>  
> +	/* Now safe to assign to state variables. */
> +	list_free(baseSearchPath);
> +	baseSearchPath = finalPath;
> +	baseCreationNamespace = firstNS;
> +	baseTempCreationPending = temp_missing;

I'm not following why this logic was moved.

> New timings:
>
>   baseline:          4.2s
>   test query:
>     without patch:  13.1s
>     0001:           11.7s
>     0001+0002:      10.5s
>     0001+0002+0003:  8.1s

Nice.  It makes sense that 0003 would provide the most benefit.

-- 
Nathan Bossart
Amazon Web Services: https://aws.amazon.com

  8. Re: Faster "SET search_path"

    Nathan Bossart <nathandbossart@gmail.com> — 2023-08-02T05:07:20Z

    On Mon, Jul 31, 2023 at 10:28:31PM -0700, Jeff Davis wrote:
> On Sat, 2023-07-29 at 12:44 -0400, Isaac Morland wrote:
>> Essentially, "just" observe efficiently (somehow) that no change is
>> needed, and skip changing it?
> 
> I gave this a try and it speeds things up some more.
> 
> There might be a surprise factor with an optimization like that,
> though. If someone becomes accustomed to the function running fast,
> then changing the search_path in the caller could slow things down a
> lot and it would be hard for the user to understand what happened.

I wonder if this is a good enough reason to _not_ proceed with this
optimization.  At the moment, I'm on the fence about it.

-- 
Nathan Bossart
Amazon Web Services: https://aws.amazon.com

  9. Re: Faster "SET search_path"

    Isaac Morland <isaac.morland@gmail.com> — 2023-08-02T05:14:27Z

    On Wed, 2 Aug 2023 at 01:07, Nathan Bossart <nathandbossart@gmail.com>
wrote:

> On Mon, Jul 31, 2023 at 10:28:31PM -0700, Jeff Davis wrote:
> > On Sat, 2023-07-29 at 12:44 -0400, Isaac Morland wrote:
> >> Essentially, "just" observe efficiently (somehow) that no change is
> >> needed, and skip changing it?
> >
> > I gave this a try and it speeds things up some more.
> >
> > There might be a surprise factor with an optimization like that,
> > though. If someone becomes accustomed to the function running fast,
> > then changing the search_path in the caller could slow things down a
> > lot and it would be hard for the user to understand what happened.
>
> I wonder if this is a good enough reason to _not_ proceed with this
> optimization.  At the moment, I'm on the fence about it.
>

Speaking as someone who uses a lot of stored procedures, many of which call
one another, I definitely want this optimization.

I don’t think the fact that an optimization might suddenly not work in a
certain situation is a reason not to optimize. What would our query planner
look like if we took that approach? Many people regularly fix performance
problems by making inscrutable adjustments to queries, sometimes after
having accidentally ruined performance by modifying the query. Instead, we
should try to find ways of making the performance more transparent. We
already have some features for this, but maybe more can be done.

  10. Re: Faster "SET search_path"

    Jeff Davis <pgsql@j-davis.com> — 2023-08-02T05:53:11Z

    On Tue, 2023-08-01 at 22:07 -0700, Nathan Bossart wrote:
> I wonder if this is a good enough reason to _not_ proceed with this
> optimization.  At the moment, I'm on the fence about it.

I was wondering the same thing. It's something that could reasonably be
explained to users; it's not what I'd call "magical", it's just
avoiding an unnecessary SET. But I could certainly see it as a cause of
confusion: "why is this query faster for user foo than user bar?".

Another concern is that the default search_path is "$foo, public" but
the safe search_path is "pg_catalog, pg_temp". So if we automatically
switch to the safe search path for functions in index expressions (as I
think we should do, at least ideally), then they'd be slow by default.
We'd need to start advising people to set their search_path to
"pg_catalog, pg_temp" to speed things up.

I'm not opposed to this optimization, but I'm not sure about it either.

Regards,
	Jeff Davis

  11. Re: Faster "SET search_path"

    Jeff Davis <pgsql@j-davis.com> — 2023-08-02T06:06:56Z

    On Wed, 2023-08-02 at 01:14 -0400, Isaac Morland wrote:
> I don’t think the fact that an optimization might suddenly not work
> in a certain situation is a reason not to optimize. What would our
> query planner look like if we took that approach?

...

> Instead, we should try to find ways of making the performance more
> transparent. We already have some features for this, but maybe more
> can be done.

Exactly; for the planner we have EXPLAIN. We could try to expose GUC
switching costs that way.

Or maybe users can start thinking of search_path as a performance-
related setting to be careful with.

Or we could try harder to optimize the switching costs so that it's not
so bad. I just started and I already saw some nice speedups; with a few
of the easy fixes done, the remaining opportunities should be more
visible in the profiler.

Regards,
	Jeff Davis

  12. Re: Faster "SET search_path"

    Jeff Davis <pgsql@j-davis.com> — 2023-08-03T06:50:28Z

    On Tue, 2023-08-01 at 21:52 -0700, Nathan Bossart wrote:
> I
> typically see this done with two ѕeparate lists and forboth().

Agreed, done.

> 
> Any reason not to use hash_combine() here?

Thank you, fixed.

> > I changed it to move the hook so that it's called after retrieving
> > from
> > the cache.
...
> I think you are right.  This adds some complexity, but I don't have
> anything else to propose at the moment.

I reworked it a bit to avoid allocations in most cases, and it only
reprocesses the oidlist and runs the hooks when necessary (and even
then, still benefits from the cached OIDs that have already passed the
ACL checks).

Now I'm seeing timings around 7.1s, which is starting to look really
nice.

> 
> I'm not following why this logic was moved.

There was previously a comment:

    "We want to detect the case where the effective value of the base
search path variables didn't change.  As long as we're doing so, we can
avoid copying the OID list unnecessarily."

But with v2 the copy had already happened by that point. In v3, there
is no copy at all.
> 

Regards,
	Jeff Davis

  13. Re: Faster "SET search_path"

    Jeff Davis <pgsql@j-davis.com> — 2023-08-07T19:57:27Z

    On Wed, 2023-08-02 at 01:14 -0400, Isaac Morland wrote:
> > > On Sat, 2023-07-29 at 12:44 -0400, Isaac Morland wrote:
> > > > Essentially, "just" observe efficiently (somehow) that no
> > > > change is
> > > > needed, and skip changing it?

...

> Speaking as someone who uses a lot of stored procedures, many of
> which call one another, I definitely want this optimization.

If we try to avoid the set_config_option() entirely, we'd have to
introduce the invalidation logic into fmgr.c somehow, and there would
be a performance cliff for users who change their session's
search_path.

Instead, in v4 (attached) I introduced a fast path (patch 0004,
experimental) for setting search_path that uses the same low-level
invalidation logic in namespace.c, but avoids most of the overhead of
set_config_option().

(Aside: part of the reason set_config_option() is slow is because of
the lookup in guc_hashtab. That's slower than some other hash lookups
because it does case-folding, which needs to be done in both the hash
function and also the match function. The hash lookups in
SearchPathCache are significantly faster. I also have a patch to change
guc_hashtab to simplehash, but I didn't see much difference.)

New timings (with session's search_path set to a, b):

  inc()        plain function:         4.1s
  inc_secdef() SECURITY DEFINER:       4.3s
  inc_wm()     SET work_mem = '4GB':   6.3s
  inc_ab()     SET search_path = a, b: 5.4s
  inc_bc()     SET search_path = b, c: 5.6s

I reported the numbers a bit differently here. All numbers are using v4
of the patch. The plain function is a baseline; SECURITY DEFINER is for
measuring the overhead of the fmgr_security_definer wrapper; inc_ab()
is for setting the search_path to the same value it's already set to;
and inc_bc() is for setting the search_path to a new value.

There's still a difference between inc() (with no proconfigs) and
inc_ab(), so you can certainly argue that some or all of that can be
avoided if the search_path is unchanged. For instance, adding the new
GUC level causes AtEOXact_GUC to be run, and that does some work. Maybe
it's even possible to avoid the fmgr_security_definer wrapper entirely
(though it would be tricky to do so).

But in general I'd prefer to optimize cases that are going to work
nicely by default for a lot of users (especially switching to a safe
search path), without the need for obscure knowledge about the
performance implications of the session search_path. And to the extent
that we do optimize for the pre-existing search_path, I'd like to
understand the inherent overhead of changing the search path versus
incidental overhead.


-- 
Jeff Davis
PostgreSQL Contributor Team - AWS

  14. Re: Faster "SET search_path"

    Nathan Bossart <nathandbossart@gmail.com> — 2023-08-07T22:39:08Z

    0001 and 0002 LGTM.  0003 is looking pretty good, too, but I think we
should get some more eyes on it, given the complexity.

On Mon, Aug 07, 2023 at 12:57:27PM -0700, Jeff Davis wrote:
> (Aside: part of the reason set_config_option() is slow is because of
> the lookup in guc_hashtab. That's slower than some other hash lookups
> because it does case-folding, which needs to be done in both the hash
> function and also the match function. The hash lookups in
> SearchPathCache are significantly faster. I also have a patch to change
> guc_hashtab to simplehash, but I didn't see much difference.)

I wonder if it'd be faster to downcase first and then pass it to
hash_bytes().  This would require modifying the key, which might be a
deal-breaker, but maybe there's some way to improve find_option() for all
GUCs.

> But in general I'd prefer to optimize cases that are going to work
> nicely by default for a lot of users (especially switching to a safe
> search path), without the need for obscure knowledge about the
> performance implications of the session search_path. And to the extent
> that we do optimize for the pre-existing search_path, I'd like to
> understand the inherent overhead of changing the search path versus
> incidental overhead.

+1

-- 
Nathan Bossart
Amazon Web Services: https://aws.amazon.com

  15. Re: Faster "SET search_path"

    Jeff Davis <pgsql@j-davis.com> — 2023-08-07T23:24:16Z

    On Mon, 2023-08-07 at 15:39 -0700, Nathan Bossart wrote:
> 0001 and 0002 LGTM.

I'll probably go ahead with 0001 soon. Simple and effective.

But for 0002, I was thinking about trying to optimize so
check_search_path() only gets called once at the beginning, rather than
for each function invocation. It's a bit of a hack right now, but it
should be correct because it's just doing a syntactic validity check
and that doesn't depend on catalog contents. If I can find a
reasonably-nice way to do this, then there's no reason to optimize the
check itself, and we wouldn't have to maintain that separate parsing
code.

I might just avoid guc.c entirely and directly set
namespace_search_path and baseSearchPathValid=false. The main thing we
lose there is the GUC stack (AtEOXact_GUC()), but there's already a
PG_TRY/PG_FINALLY block in fmgr_security_definer, so we can use that to
change it back safely. (I think? I need to convince myself that it's
safe to skip the work in guc.c, at least for the special case of
search_path, and that it won't be too fragile.)

I started down this road and it gets even closer in performance to the
plain function call. I don't know if we'll ever call it zero cost, but
safety has a cost sometimes.

>   0003 is looking pretty good, too, but I think we
> should get some more eyes on it, given the complexity.

I'm happy with 0003 and I'm fairly sure we want it, but I agree that
another set of eyes would be nice so I'll give it a bit more time. I
could also improve the testing; any suggestions here are welcome.

> I wonder if it'd be faster to downcase first and then pass it to
> hash_bytes().  This would require modifying the key, which might be a
> deal-breaker, but maybe there's some way to improve find_option() for
> all
> GUCs.

I thought about that and I don't think modifying the argument is a good
API.

For the match function, I added a fast path for strcmp()==0 with a
fallback to case folding (on the assumption that the case is consistent
in most cases, especially built-in ones). For the hash function, I used
a stack buffer and downcased the first K bytes into that, then did
hash_bytes(buff, K). Those improved things a bit but it wasn't an
exciting amount so I didn't post it. I made a patch to port guc_hashtab
to simplehash because it seems like a better fit than hsearch.h; but
again, I didn't see exciting numbers from doing so, so I didn't post
it.

> 
Maybe we could use perfect hashing for the built-in GUCs, and fall back
to simplehash for the custom GUCs?

Regardless, I'm mostly interested in search_path because I want to get
to the point where we can recommend that users specify it for every
function that depends on it. A special case to facilitate that without
compromising (much) on performance seems reasonable to me.

Regards,
	Jeff Davis

  16. Re: Faster "SET search_path"

    Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> — 2023-08-15T17:04:45Z

    On Mon, Aug 7, 2023 at 7:24 PM Jeff Davis <pgsql@j-davis.com> wrote:
> I might just avoid guc.c entirely and directly set
> namespace_search_path and baseSearchPathValid=false. The main thing we
> lose there is the GUC stack (AtEOXact_GUC()), but there's already a
> PG_TRY/PG_FINALLY block in fmgr_security_definer, so we can use that to
> change it back safely. (I think? I need to convince myself that it's
> safe to skip the work in guc.c, at least for the special case of
> search_path, and that it won't be too fragile.)

I suspect that dodging the GUC stack machinery is not a very good
idea. The timing of when TRY/CATCH blocks are called is different from
when subtransactions are aborted, and that distinction has messed me
up more than once when trying to code various things. Specifically,
changes that happen in a CATCH block happen before we actually reach
Abort(Sub)Transaction, which sort of makes it sound like you'd be
reverting back to the old value too early. The GUC stack is also
pretty complicated because of the SET/SAVE and LOCAL/non-LOCAL stuff.
I can't say there isn't a way to make something like what you're
talking about here work, but I bet it will be difficult to get all of
the corner cases right, and I suspect that trying to speed up the
existing mechanism is a better plan than trying to go around it.

-- 
Robert Haas
EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com

  17. Re: Faster "SET search_path"

    Jeff Davis <pgsql@j-davis.com> — 2023-08-16T22:09:43Z

    On Tue, 2023-08-15 at 13:04 -0400, Robert Haas wrote:
> I suspect that dodging the GUC stack machinery is not a very good
> idea. The timing of when TRY/CATCH blocks are called is different
> from
> when subtransactions are aborted, and that distinction has messed me
> up more than once when trying to code various things.

...

> I can't say there isn't a way to make something like what you're
> talking about here work, but I bet it will be difficult to get all of
> the corner cases right, and I suspect that trying to speed up the
> existing mechanism is a better plan than trying to go around it.

The SearchPathCache that I implemented (0003) is an example of speeding
up the existing mechnism that and already offers a huge speedup. I'll
focus on getting that in first. That patch has had some review and I'm
tempted to commit it soon, but Nathan has requested another set of eyes
on it.

To bring the overhead closer to zero we need to somehow avoid repeating
so much work in guc.c, though. If we don't go around it, another
approach would be to separate GUC setting into two phases: one that
does the checks, and one that performs the final change. All the real
work (hash lookup, guc_strdup, and check_search_path) is done in the
"check" phase.

It's a bit painful to reorganize the code in guc.c, though, so that
might need to happen in a few parts and will depend on how great the
demand is.

Regards,
	Jeff Davis

  18. Re: Faster "SET search_path"

    Jeff Davis <pgsql@j-davis.com> — 2023-08-22T21:45:04Z

    On Wed, 2023-08-16 at 15:09 -0700, Jeff Davis wrote:
> To bring the overhead closer to zero we need to somehow avoid
> repeating
> so much work in guc.c, though. If we don't go around it, another
> approach would be to separate GUC setting into two phases: one that
> does the checks, and one that performs the final change. All the real
> work (hash lookup, guc_strdup, and check_search_path) is done in the
> "check" phase.
> 
> It's a bit painful to reorganize the code in guc.c, though, so that
> might need to happen in a few parts and will depend on how great the
> demand is.

I looked into this, and one problem is that there are two different
memory allocators at work. In guc.c, the new value is guc_strdup'd, and
needs to be saved until it replaces the old value. But if the caller
(in fmgr.c) saves the state in fmgr_security_definer_cache, it would be
saving a guc_strdup'd value, and we'd need to be careful about freeing
that if (and only if) the final set step of the GUC doesn't happen. Or,
we'd need to somehow use pstrdup() instead, and somehow tell guc.c not
to guc_free() it.

Those are obviously solvable, but I don't see a clean way to do so.
Perhaps it's still better than circumventing guc.c entirely (because
that approach probably suffers from the same problem, in addition to
the problem you raised), but I'm not sure if it's worth it to take on
this level of complexity. Suggestions welcome.

Right now I'm still intending to get the cache in place, which doesn't
have these downsides and provides a nice speedup.

Regards,
	Jeff Davis

  19. Re: Faster "SET search_path"

    Jeff Davis <pgsql@j-davis.com> — 2023-09-12T20:55:22Z

    On Mon, 2023-08-07 at 15:39 -0700, Nathan Bossart wrote:
> 0003 is looking pretty good, too, but I think we
> should get some more eyes on it, given the complexity.

Attached rebased version of 0003.

-- 
Jeff Davis
PostgreSQL Contributor Team - AWS

  20. Re: Faster "SET search_path"

    Jeff Davis <pgsql@j-davis.com> — 2023-09-15T18:31:10Z

    On Tue, 2023-09-12 at 13:55 -0700, Jeff Davis wrote:
> On Mon, 2023-08-07 at 15:39 -0700, Nathan Bossart wrote:
> > 0003 is looking pretty good, too, but I think we
> > should get some more eyes on it, given the complexity.
> 
> Attached rebased version of 0003.

Is someone else planning to look at 0003, or should I just proceed? It
seems to be clearly wanted, and I think it's better to get it in this
'fest than to wait.

Regards,
	Jeff Davis

  21. Re: Faster "SET search_path"

    Jeff Davis <pgsql@j-davis.com> — 2023-10-20T02:01:36Z

    On Fri, 2023-09-15 at 11:31 -0700, Jeff Davis wrote:
> On Tue, 2023-09-12 at 13:55 -0700, Jeff Davis wrote:
> > On Mon, 2023-08-07 at 15:39 -0700, Nathan Bossart wrote:
> > > 0003 is looking pretty good, too, but I think we
> > > should get some more eyes on it, given the complexity.
> > 
> > Attached rebased version of 0003.
> 
> Is someone else planning to look at 0003, or should I just proceed?
> It
> seems to be clearly wanted, and I think it's better to get it in this
> 'fest than to wait.

Attaching a new version, as well as some additional optimizations.

Changes:

* I separated it into more small functions, and generally refactored
quite a bit trying to make it easier to review.

* The new version is more careful about what might happen during an
OOM, or in weird cases such as a huge number of distinct search_path
strings.

0003: Cache for recomputeNamespacePath.
0004: Use the same cache to optimize check_search_path().
0005: Optimize cache for repeated lookups of the same value.

Applying the same tests as described in the first message[1], the new
numbers are:

  baseline:               4.4s
  test query:
    without patch:       12.3s
    0003:                 8.8s
    0003,0004:            7.4s
    0003,0004,0005:       7.0s

This brings the slowdown from 180% on master down to about 60%. Still
not where we want to be exactly, but more tolerable.

The profile shows a few more areas worth looking at, so I suppose a bit
more effort could bring it down further. find_option(), for instance,
is annoyingly slow because it does case folding.

Regards,
	Jeff Davis

[1]
https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/04c8592dbd694e4114a3ed87139a7a04e4363030.camel%40j-davis.com

  22. Re: Faster "SET search_path"

    Jeff Davis <pgsql@j-davis.com> — 2023-11-15T04:13:25Z

    On Thu, 2023-10-19 at 19:01 -0700, Jeff Davis wrote:
> 0003: Cache for recomputeNamespacePath.

Committed with some further simplification around the OOM handling.
Instead of using MCXT_ALLOC_NO_OOM, it just temporarily sets the cache
invalid while copying the string, and sets it valid again before
returning. That way, if an OOM occurs during the string copy, the cache
will be reset.

Also some minor cleanup.

> 0004: Use the same cache to optimize check_search_path().
> 0005: Optimize cache for repeated lookups of the same value.

I intend to commit these fairly soon, as well.

Regards,
	Jeff Davis

  23. Re: Faster "SET search_path"

    Jeff Davis <pgsql@j-davis.com> — 2023-11-17T00:46:10Z

    On Tue, 2023-11-14 at 20:13 -0800, Jeff Davis wrote:
> On Thu, 2023-10-19 at 19:01 -0700, Jeff Davis wrote:
> > 0003: Cache for recomputeNamespacePath.
> 
> Committed with some further simplification around the OOM handling.

While I considered OOM during hash key initialization, I missed some
other potential out-of-memory hazards. Attached a fixup patch 0003,
which re-introduces one list copy but it simplifies things
substantially in addition to being safer around OOM conditions.

> > 0004: Use the same cache to optimize check_search_path().
> > 0005: Optimize cache for repeated lookups of the same value.

Also attached new versions of these patches.

Regards,
	Jeff Davis

  24. Re: Faster "SET search_path"

    Jeff Davis <pgsql@j-davis.com> — 2023-11-21T01:13:33Z

    On Thu, 2023-11-16 at 16:46 -0800, Jeff Davis wrote:
> While I considered OOM during hash key initialization, I missed some
> other potential out-of-memory hazards. Attached a fixup patch 0003,
> which re-introduces one list copy but it simplifies things
> substantially in addition to being safer around OOM conditions.

Committed 0003 fixup.

> > > 0004: Use the same cache to optimize check_search_path().

Committed 0004.

> > > 0005: Optimize cache for repeated lookups of the same value.

Will commit 0005 soon.

I also attached a trivial 0006 patch that uses SH_STORE_HASH. I wasn't
able to show much benefit, though, even when there's a bucket
collision. Perhaps there just aren't enough elements to matter -- I
suppose there would be a benefit if there are lots of unique
search_path strings, but that doesn't seem very plausible to me. If
someone thinks it's worth committing, then I will, but I don't see any
real upside or downside.

Regards,
	Jeff Davis

  25. Re: Faster "SET search_path"

    Jeff Davis <pgsql@j-davis.com> — 2023-12-05T23:55:11Z

    On Mon, 2023-11-20 at 17:13 -0800, Jeff Davis wrote:
> Will commit 0005 soon.

Committed.

> I also attached a trivial 0006 patch that uses SH_STORE_HASH. I
> wasn't
> able to show much benefit, though, even when there's a bucket
> collision. Perhaps there just aren't enough elements to matter -- I
> suppose there would be a benefit if there are lots of unique
> search_path strings, but that doesn't seem very plausible to me. If
> someone thinks it's worth committing, then I will, but I don't see
> any
> real upside or downside.

I tried again by forcing a hash table with ~25 entries and 13
collisions, and even then, SH_STORE_HASH didn't make a difference in my
test. Maybe a microbenchmark would show a difference, but I didn't see
much reason to commit 0006. (There's also no downside, so I was tempted
to commit it just so I wouldn't have to put more thought into whether
it's a problem or not.)

Regards,
	Jeff Davis

  26. Re: Faster "SET search_path"

    Noah Misch <noah@leadboat.com> — 2024-06-30T22:30:47Z

    On Tue, Nov 14, 2023 at 08:13:25PM -0800, Jeff Davis wrote:
> On Thu, 2023-10-19 at 19:01 -0700, Jeff Davis wrote:
> > 0003: Cache for recomputeNamespacePath.
> 
> Committed

Commit f26c236 wrote:
>     Add cache for recomputeNamespacePath().
>     
>     When search_path is changed to something that was previously set, and
>     no invalidation happened in between, use the cached list of namespace
>     OIDs rather than recomputing them. This avoids syscache lookups and
>     ACL checks.

> --- a/src/backend/catalog/namespace.c
> +++ b/src/backend/catalog/namespace.c

> @@ -109,11 +110,13 @@
>   * activeSearchPath is always the actually active path; it points to
>   * to baseSearchPath which is the list derived from namespace_search_path.
>   *
> - * If baseSearchPathValid is false, then baseSearchPath (and other
> - * derived variables) need to be recomputed from namespace_search_path.
> - * We mark it invalid upon an assignment to namespace_search_path or receipt
> - * of a syscache invalidation event for pg_namespace.  The recomputation
> - * is done during the next lookup attempt.
> + * If baseSearchPathValid is false, then baseSearchPath (and other derived
> + * variables) need to be recomputed from namespace_search_path, or retrieved
> + * from the search path cache if there haven't been any syscache
> + * invalidations.  We mark it invalid upon an assignment to
> + * namespace_search_path or receipt of a syscache invalidation event for
> + * pg_namespace or pg_authid.  The recomputation is done during the next

You're caching the result of object_aclcheck(NamespaceRelationId, ...), so
pg_auth_members changes and pg_database changes also need to invalidate this
cache.  (pg_database affects the ACL_CREATE_TEMP case in
pg_namespace_aclmask_ext() and affects ROLE_PG_DATABASE_OWNER membership.)

  27. Re: Faster "SET search_path"

    Jeff Davis <pgsql@j-davis.com> — 2024-07-08T23:39:21Z

    On Sun, 2024-06-30 at 15:30 -0700, Noah Misch wrote:
> You're caching the result of object_aclcheck(NamespaceRelationId,
> ...), so
> pg_auth_members changes

Thank you for the report.

Question: to check for changes to pg_auth_members, it seems like either
AUTHMEMROLEMEM or AUTHMEMMEMROLE work, and to use both would be
redundant. Am I missing something, or should I just pick one
arbitrarily (or by some convention)?

>  and pg_database changes also need to invalidate this
> cache.  (pg_database affects the ACL_CREATE_TEMP case in
> pg_namespace_aclmask_ext()

I am having trouble finding an actual problem with ACL_CREATE_TEMP.
search_path ACL checks are normally bypassed for the temp namespace, so
it can only happen when the actual temp namespace name (e.g.
pg_temp_NNN) is explicitly included. In that case, the mask is
ACL_USAGE, so the two branches in pg_namespace_aclmask_ext() are
equivalent, right?

This question is not terribly important for the fix, because
invalidating for each pg_database change is still necessary as you
point out in here:

>  and affects ROLE_PG_DATABASE_OWNER membership.)

Another good catch, thank you.

Patch attached. Contains a bit of cleanup and is intended for 17+18.

Regards,
	Jeff Davis

  28. Re: Faster "SET search_path"

    Noah Misch <noah@leadboat.com> — 2024-07-09T00:20:11Z

    On Mon, Jul 08, 2024 at 04:39:21PM -0700, Jeff Davis wrote:
> On Sun, 2024-06-30 at 15:30 -0700, Noah Misch wrote:
> > You're caching the result of object_aclcheck(NamespaceRelationId,
> > ...), so
> > pg_auth_members changes
> 
> Thank you for the report.
> 
> Question: to check for changes to pg_auth_members, it seems like either
> AUTHMEMROLEMEM or AUTHMEMMEMROLE work, and to use both would be
> redundant. Am I missing something, or should I just pick one
> arbitrarily (or by some convention)?

One suffices.  initialize_acl() is the only other place that invals on this
catalog, so consider it a fine convention to mimic.

> >  and pg_database changes also need to invalidate this
> > cache.  (pg_database affects the ACL_CREATE_TEMP case in
> > pg_namespace_aclmask_ext()
> 
> I am having trouble finding an actual problem with ACL_CREATE_TEMP.
> search_path ACL checks are normally bypassed for the temp namespace, so
> it can only happen when the actual temp namespace name (e.g.
> pg_temp_NNN) is explicitly included. In that case, the mask is
> ACL_USAGE, so the two branches in pg_namespace_aclmask_ext() are
> equivalent, right?

I don't know.

> This question is not terribly important for the fix, because
> invalidating for each pg_database change is still necessary as you
> point out