Re: int2 vs int4 in Postgres

On Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 12:54:05PM -0500, Announce wrote:
> Is there an performance benefit to using int2 (instead of int4) in cases
> where i know i will be well within its numeric range? I want to conserve
> storage space and gain speed anywhere i can, but i know some apps simply end
> up casting 2byte data to 4byte (like Java int/short).
>
> These int2 values will be used in primary and foreign key fields and I know
> that i must explicitly use tick marks (ex: where int2_column = '12') in
> order to make use of indexes, but my question is IS IT WORTH IT?  IS THERE
> ANY REAL GAIN FOR DOING THIS?

> An simple scenario would be:
>
> Songs
> -------
> song_id serial pkey
> genre   int2   fkey
> title    varchar

Not in this case, because the varchar column that follows the int2
column needs 4-byte alignment, so after the int2 column there must be 2
bytes of padding.

If you had two consecutive int2 fields you would save some the space.
Or int2/bool/bool (bool has 1-byte alignment), etc.

This assumes you are in a tipical x86 environment ... in other
environments the situation may be different.

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