Re: Reduce timing overhead of EXPLAIN ANALYZE using rdtsc?

Hi
>
> I think at least some should be converted to just accumulate in an
> instr_time...
I think that's for a later patch though?
> Yep, at least quite similar.
OK. I coded it up in the latest version of the patch.
> Depending on how low we want to keep the error, I don't think we can:
>
> If I set the allowed deviation to 10**-9, we end up requiring a shift by 29
> for common ghz ranges. Clearly 33bits isn't an interesting range.
>
> But even if you accept a higher error - we don't have *that* much range
> available. Assuming an uint64, the range is ~584 years. If we want 10 years
> range, we end up
>
>    math.log(((2**64)-1) / (10 * 365 * 60 * 60 * 24 * 10**9), 2)
>    ~= 5.87
>
> So 5 bits available that we could "use" for multiply/shift. For something like
> 2.5ghz, that'd be ~2% error, clearly not acceptable.  And even just a year of
> range, ends up allowing a failure of 30796s = 8min over a year, still too
> high.
Thanks for doing the math. Agreed. The latest patch detects overflow and 
correctly handles it.
> But I don't think it's really an issue - normally that branch will never be
> taken (at least within the memory of the branch predictor), which on modern
> CPUs means it'll just be predicted as not taken. So as long as we tell the
> compiler what's the likely branch, it should be fine. At least as long as the
> branch compares with a hardcoded number.
Yeah. The overflow detection just compares two int64. The "overflow 
threshold" is pre-computed.
> - the restriction just to linux, that'll make testing harder for some, and
>    ends up encoding too much OS dependency
> - I think we need both the barrier and non-barrier variant, otherwise I
>    suspect we'll end up with inccuracies we don't want
> - needs lots more documentation about why certain cpuid registers are used
> - cpu microarch dependencies - isn't there, e.g., the case that the scale on
>    nehalem has to be different than on later architectures?
> - lack of facility to evaluate how well the different time sources work
Makes sense. I carried that list over to my latest e-mail which also 
includes the patch to have some sort of summary of where we are in a 
single place.

-- 
David Geier
(ServiceNow)