Re: Minor performance improvement in transition to external sort

On 06/02/14 18:21, Jeff Janes wrote:
>   How big of
> sets were you sorting in each case?

Big enough to go external.  The timings and compare-counts given are
purely for the heapify stage not the total for the sort, so are
constrained by the work_mem not by the sort size per se.

I'm limited to working on a small machine, so the work_mem value
of 1e+6 is approaching my top limit of sort-time pain unless I rip the
heapify out into a test harness.  What range of work_mem is it useful
to test over?

>  Was it always just slightly bigger
> than would fit in work_mem?

I didn't check.

>  Did you try sorting already-sorted, reverse
> sorted, or pipe-organ shaped data sets?

Not yet, but I can.  What variety of pipe-organ shape is of
interest (I can think of several that might be called that)?

>  We will also need to test it on
> strings.  I usually use md5(random()::text) to generate strings for such
> purposes, at least for a first pass.

OK.

>
> The name of the attached patch is a bit unfortunate.

Is there a project standard for this?

>  And I'm not sure what
> you are doing with tupindex, the change there doesn't seem to be necessary
> to the rest of your work, so some explanation on that would be helpful.

I'll add commentary.

> The project coding style usually has comments in blocks before loops on
> which they comment, rather than interspersed throughout the clauses of the
> "for" statement.

I'll adjust that.

> Another optimization that is possible is to do only one comparison at each
> level (between the two children) all the way down the heap, and then
> compare the parent to the chain of smallest children in reverse order.
>   This can substantially reduce the number of comparisons on average,
> because most tuples sift most of the way down the heap (because most of the
> tuples are at the bottom of the heap).

Sounds interesting; I'll see if I can get that going.

> (Also, I think you should make your siftdown code look more like the
> existing siftdown code.)

A function called by the outer loop?  Can do; the existing does that
because the function is called from multiple places but this will only
be used the once.

Thanks for the review.
-- 
Jeremy