Re: stack usage in toast_insert_or_update()

On 1/31/2007 12:41 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
> "Pavan Deolasee" <pavan.deolasee@gmail.com> writes:
>> On 1/31/07, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
>>> The toast code takes pains to ensure that the tuples it creates won't be
>>> subject to re-toasting.  Else it'd be an infinite recursion.
> 
>> I think I found it. The toast_insert_or_update() function gets into an
>> unnecessary recursion because of alignment issues. It thus toasts
>> already toasted data.  This IMHO might be causing unnecessary
>> overheads for each toast operation.
> 
> Interesting --- I'd never seen this because both of my usual development
> machines have MAXALIGN 8, and it works out that that makes
> TOAST_MAX_CHUNK_SIZE 1986, which makes the actual toasted tuple size
> 2030, which maxaligns to 2032, which is still less than
> TOAST_TUPLE_THRESHOLD.  I think the coding was implicitly assuming that
> TOAST_TUPLE_THRESHOLD would itself be a maxalign'd value, but it's not
> necessarily (and in fact not, with the current page header size ---
> I wonder whether the bug was originally masked because the page header
> size was different??)
> 
> We can't change TOAST_MAX_CHUNK_SIZE without forcing an initdb, but I
> think that it would be safe to remove the MAXALIGN'ing of the tuple
> size in the tests in heapam.c, that is
> 
>     if (HeapTupleHasExternal(tup) ||
>         (MAXALIGN(tup->t_len) > TOAST_TUPLE_THRESHOLD))
>         heaptup = toast_insert_or_update(relation, tup, NULL);
>     else
>         heaptup = tup;
> 
> becomes
> 
>     if (HeapTupleHasExternal(tup) ||
>         (tup->t_len > TOAST_TUPLE_THRESHOLD))
>         heaptup = toast_insert_or_update(relation, tup, NULL);
>     else
>         heaptup = tup;
> 
> which'll save a cycle or two as well as avoid this corner case.
> It seems like a number of the uses of MAXALIGN in tuptoaster.c
> are useless/bogus as well.  Comments?

Can't we maxalign the page header in the calculations?


Jan

> 
>             regards, tom lane
> 
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