Re: UUID data format 4x-4x-4x-4x-4x-4x-4x-4x

James Mansion wrote:
> Mark Mielke wrote:
>> I recall there being a measurable performance difference between the 
>> most liberal parser, and the most optimized parser, back when I wrote 
>> one for PostgreSQL. I don't know how good the one in use for 
>> PostgreSQL 8.3 is. As to whether the cost is noticeable to people or 
>> not - that depends on what they are doing. The problem is that a UUID 
>> is pretty big, and parsing it liberally means a loop.
>>
> It just seems odd - I would have thought one would use re2c or ragel 
> to generate something and the performance would essentially be O[n] on 
> the input length in characters - using either a collection of allowed 
> forms or an engine that normalises case and discards the '-' 
> characters between any hex pairs. 

Instruction level parallelism allows for multiple hex values to be 
processed in parallel, whereas a loop relies on branch prediction and 
speculative load and store? :-)

The liberal version is difficult to unroll. The strict version is easy 
to unroll.

> So yes these would have a control loop.  Is that so bad?
>
> Either way its hard to imagine how parsing a string of this length 
> could create a measurable performance issue compared to what will 
> happen with the value post parse.

I think so too.

Cheers,
mark

-- 
Mark Mielke <mark@mielke.cc>