Re: Poor memory context performance in large hash joins

Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>

From: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
To: Jeff Janes <jeff.janes@gmail.com>
Cc: pgsql-hackers <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>
Date: 2017-02-24T18:59:45Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
Jeff Janes <jeff.janes@gmail.com> writes:
> On Thu, Feb 23, 2017 at 2:28 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
>> Maybe it's time to convert that to a doubly-linked list.

> I don't think that would help.  You would need some heuristic to guess
> whether the chunk you are looking for is near the front, or near the end.

Uh, what?  In a doubly-linked list, you can remove an element in O(1)
time, you don't need any searching.  It basically becomes
      item->prev->next = item->next;
      item->next->prev = item->prev;
modulo possible special cases for the head and tail elements.

>> Although if the
>> hash code is producing a whole lot of requests that are only a bit bigger
>> than the separate-block threshold, I'd say It's Doing It Wrong.  It should
>> learn to aggregate them into larger requests.

> Right now it is using compiled-in 32KB chunks.  Should it use something
> like max(32kb,work_mem/128) instead?

I'd say it should double the size of the request each time.  That's what
we do in most places.

			regards, tom lane


Commits

  1. Use doubly-linked block lists in aset.c to reduce large-chunk overhead.