Re: Should heapam_estimate_rel_size consider fillfactor?

Peter Eisentraut <peter@eisentraut.org>

From: Peter Eisentraut <peter@eisentraut.org>
To: Corey Huinker <corey.huinker@gmail.com>, Tomas Vondra <tomas.vondra@enterprisedb.com>
Cc: PostgreSQL Hackers <pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org>
Date: 2023-07-03T06:46:00Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
On 14.06.23 20:41, Corey Huinker wrote:
>     So maybe we should make table_block_relation_estimate_size smarter to
>     also consider the fillfactor in the "no statistics" branch, per the
>     attached patch.
> 
> 
> I like this a lot. The reasoning is obvious, the fix is simple,it 
> doesn't upset any make-check-world tests, and in order to get a 
> performance regression we'd need a table whose fillfactor has been 
> changed after the data was loaded but before an analyze happens, and 
> that's a narrow enough case to accept.
> 
> My only nitpick is to swap
> 
>     (usable_bytes_per_page * fillfactor / 100) / tuple_width
> 
> with
> 
>     (usable_bytes_per_page * fillfactor) / (tuple_width * 100)
> 
> 
> as this will eliminate the extra remainder truncation, and it also gets 
> the arguments "in order" algebraically.

The fillfactor is in percent, so it makes sense to divide it by 100 
first before doing any further arithmetic with it.  I find your version 
of this to be more puzzling without any explanation.  You could do 
fillfactor/100.0 to avoid the integer division, but then, the comment 
above that says "integer division is intentional here", without any 
further explanation.  I think a bit more explanation of all the 
subtleties here would be good in any case.




Commits

  1. Correct relation size estimate with low fillfactor

  2. Consider fillfactor when estimating relation size