Re: Performance improvements for src/port/snprintf.c

Andrew Gierth <andrew@tao11.riddles.org.uk>

From: Andrew Gierth <andrew@tao11.riddles.org.uk>
To: Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>
Cc: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>, Alexander Kuzmenkov <a.kuzmenkov@postgrespro.ru>, pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org
Date: 2018-09-27T03:53:27Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
>>>>> "Andres" == Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de> writes:

 Andres> Hm, stb's results just for floating point isn't bad. The above
 Andres> numbers were for %f %f. But as the minimal usage would be about
 Andres> the internal usage of dopr(), here's comparing %.*f:

 Andres> snprintf time = 1324.87 ms total, 0.000264975 ms per iteration
 Andres> pg time = 1434.57 ms total, 0.000286915 ms per iteration
 Andres> stbsp time = 552.14 ms total, 0.000110428 ms per iteration

Hmm. We had a case recently on IRC where the performance of float8out
turned out to be the major bottleneck: a table of about 2.7 million rows
and ~70 float columns showed an overhead of ~66 seconds for doing COPY
as opposed to COPY BINARY (the actual problem report was that doing
"select * from table" from R was taking a minute+ longer than expected,
we got comparative timings for COPY just to narrow down causes).

That translates to approx. 0.00035 ms overhead (i.e. time(float8out) -
time(float8send)) per conversion (Linux server, hardware unknown).

That 66 seconds was the difference between 18s and 1m24s, so it wasn't a
small factor but totally dominated the query time.

-- 
Andrew (irc:RhodiumToad)


Commits

  1. Improve snprintf.c's handling of NaN, Infinity, and minus zero.

  2. Rationalize snprintf.c's handling of "ll" formats.

  3. Provide fast path in snprintf.c for conversion specs that are just "%s".

  4. Make assorted performance improvements in snprintf.c.

  5. Set snprintf.c's maximum number of NL arguments to be 31.

  6. Always use our own versions of *printf().