Re: Performance problem in PLPgSQL

On 23/08/2013 23:55, Tom Lane wrote:
> Pavel Stehule <pavel.stehule@gmail.com> writes:
>> please, can you send a self explained test
>> this issue should be fixed, and we need a examples.
> We already had a perfectly good example at the beginning of this thread.
> What's missing is a decision on how we ought to approximate the cost of
> planning (relative to execution costs).
>
> As I mentioned upthread, it doesn't seem unreasonable to me to do
> something quick-and-dirty based on the length of the plan's rangetable.
> Pretty nearly anything would fix these specific situations where the
> estimated execution cost is negligible.  It's possible that there are
> more complicated cases where we'll need a more accurate estimate, but
> we've not seen an example of that yet.
>
> My previous suggestion was to estimate planning cost as
>     10 * (length(plan->rangetable) + 1)
> but on reflection it ought to be scaled by one of the cpu cost constants,
> so perhaps
>     1000 * cpu_operator_cost * (length(plan->rangetable) + 1)
> which'd mean a custom plan has to be estimated to save a minimum of
> about 5 cost units (more if more than 1 table is used) before it'll
> be chosen.  I'm tempted to make the multiplier be 10000 not 1000,
> but it seems better to be conservative about changing the behavior
> until we see how well this works in practice.
>
> Objections, better ideas?
>
>             regards, tom lane
No better idea as far as I'm concerned, of course :)

But it is a bit tricky to understand what is going on when you get
hit by it, and using a very approximated cost of the planning time
seems the most logical to me. So I'm all for this solution.