Re: Vacuum: allow usage of more than 1GB of work mem

On Thu, Apr 20, 2017 at 5:24 PM, Claudio Freire <klaussfreire@gmail.com> wrote:
>> What's not clear to me is how sensitive the performance of vacuum is
>> to the number of cycles used here.  For a large index, the number of
>> searches will presumably be quite large, so it does seem worth
>> worrying about performance.  But if we just always used a binary
>> search, would that lose enough performance with small numbers of
>> segments that anyone would care?  If so, maybe we need to use linear
>> search for small numbers of segments and switch to binary search with
>> larger numbers of segments.
>
> I just went and tested.

Thanks!

> That's after inlining the compare on both the linear and sequential
> code, and it seems it lets the compiler optimize the binary search to
> the point where it outperforms the sequential search.
>
> That's not the case when the compare isn't inlined.
>
> That seems in line with [1], that show the impact of various
> optimizations on both algorithms. It's clearly a close enough race
> that optimizations play a huge role.
>
> Since we're not likely to go and implement SSE2-optimized versions, I
> believe I'll leave the binary search only. That's the attached patch
> set.

That sounds reasonable based on your test results.  I guess part of
what I was wondering is whether a vacuum on a table large enough to
require multiple gigabytes of work_mem isn't likely to be I/O-bound
anyway.  If so, a few cycles one way or the other other isn't likely
to matter much.  If not, where exactly are all of those CPU cycles
going?

-- 
Robert Haas
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