Re: Sort functions with specialized comparators

Hello all.

I am interested in the proposed patch and would like to propose some
additional changes that would complement it. My changes would introduce
similar optimizations when working with a list of integers or object
identifiers. Additionally, my patch includes an extension for benchmarking,
which shows an average speedup of 30-40%.

postgres=# SELECT bench_oid_sort(1000000);
                                                 bench_oid_sort

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Time taken by list_sort: 116990848 ns, Time taken by list_oid_sort:
80446640 ns, Percentage difference: 31.24%
(1 row)

postgres=# SELECT bench_int_sort(1000000);
                                                 bench_int_sort

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Time taken by list_sort: 118168506 ns, Time taken by list_int_sort:
80523373 ns, Percentage difference: 31.86%
(1 row)

What do you think about these changes?

Best regards, Stepan Neretin.

On Fri, Jun 7, 2024 at 11:08 PM Andrey M. Borodin <x4mmm@yandex-team.ru>
wrote:

> Hi!
>
> In a thread about sorting comparators[0] Andres noted that we have
> infrastructure to help compiler optimize sorting. PFA attached PoC
> implementation. I've checked that it indeed works on the benchmark from
> that thread.
>
> postgres=# CREATE TABLE arrays_to_sort AS
>    SELECT array_shuffle(a) arr
>    FROM
>        (SELECT ARRAY(SELECT generate_series(1, 1000000)) a),
>        generate_series(1, 10);
>
> postgres=# SELECT (sort(arr))[1] FROM arrays_to_sort; -- original
> Time: 990.199 ms
> postgres=# SELECT (sort(arr))[1] FROM arrays_to_sort; -- patched
> Time: 696.156 ms
>
> The benefit seems to be on the order of magnitude with 30% speedup.
>
> There's plenty of sorting by TransactionId, BlockNumber, OffsetNumber, Oid
> etc. But this sorting routines never show up in perf top or something like
> that.
>
> Seems like in most cases we do not spend much time in sorting. But
> specialization does not cost us much too, only some CPU cycles of a
> compiler. I think we can further improve speedup by converting inline
> comparator to value extractor: more compilers will see what is actually
> going on. But I have no proofs for this reasoning.
>
> What do you think?
>
>
> Best regards, Andrey Borodin.
>
> [0]
> https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/20240209184014.sobshkcsfjix6u4r%40awork3.anarazel.de#fc23df2cf314bef35095b632380b4a59
>