Re: Reduce heap tuple header size

Jan Wieck wrote:
> Tom Lane wrote:
> >
> > Jan Wieck <JanWieck@Yahoo.com> writes:
> > > Do we have any hard numbers on that? Is it just access to the header
> > > fields, or do we loose the offset cacheability of all fixed size fields
> > > at the beginning of a row? In the latter case count me into the
> > > slowness-believer camp.
> >
> > I don't believe the patch would have made the header variable size,
> > only changed what the fixed size is.  The slowdown I was worried about
> > was just a matter of a couple extra tests and branches in the tqual.c
> > routines; which would be negligible if they weren't such hotspots.
>
> Did someone run at least pgbench with/without that patch applied?

No, but he did perform this analysis:

> thus reducing the additional cost to one t_infomask compare,
> because the Satisfies functions only access Cmin and Cmax,
> when HEAP_MOVED is known to be not set.
>
> OTOH experimenting with a moderatly sized "out of production"
> database I got the following results:
>                          | pages | pages |
> relkind | count | tuples | before| after | savings
> --------+-------+--------+-------+-------+--------
> i       |    31 | 808146 |  8330 |  8330 |   0.00%
> r       |    32 | 612968 | 13572 | 13184 |   2.86%
> all     |    63 |        | 21902 | 21514 |   1.77%
>
> 2.86% fewer heap pages mean 2.86% less disk IO caused by heap pages.
> Considering that index pages tend to benefit more from caching
> we conclude that heap pages contribute more to the overall
> IO load, so the total savings in the number of disk IOs should
> be better than the 1.77% shown in the table above.  I think
> this outweighs a few CPU cycles now and then.

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