Re: gettimeofday is at the end of its usefulness?

On 6/8/16 9:56 AM, Tom Lane wrote:
> Thom Brown <thom@linux.com> writes:
>> On 15 May 2014 at 19:56, Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us> wrote:
>>> On Tue, May 13, 2014 at 06:58:11PM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
>>>> A recent question from Tim Kane prompted me to measure the overhead
>>>> costs of EXPLAIN ANALYZE, which I'd not checked in awhile.  Things
>>>> are far worse than I thought.  On my current server (by no means
>>>> lavish hardware: Xeon E5-2609 @2.40GHz) a simple seqscan can run
>>>> at something like 110 nsec per row:
>
>> Did this idea die, or is it still worth considering?
>
> We still have a problem, for sure.  I'm not sure that there was any
> consensus on what to do about it.  Using clock_gettime(CLOCK_REALTIME)
> if available would be a straightforward change that should ameliorate
> gettimeofday()'s 1-usec-precision-limit problem; but it doesn't do
> anything to fix the excessive-overhead problem.  The ideas about the
> latter were all over the map, and none of them looked easy.
>
> If you're feeling motivated to work on this area, feel free.

Semi-related: someone (Robert I think) recently mentioned investigating 
"vectorized" executor nodes, where multiple tuples would be processed in 
one shot. If we had that presumably the explain penalty would be a moot 
point.
-- 
Jim Nasby, Data Architect, Blue Treble Consulting, Austin TX
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