Re: Inlining comparators as a performance optimisation

On 1 December 2011 17:15, Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> wrote:
> One thing I'm starting to get a bit concerned about is the effect of
> this patch on the size of the resulting binary.  The performance
> results you've posted are getting steadily more impressive as you get
> into this, which is cool, but it seems like the number of copies of
> the qsort logic that you're proposing to include in the resulting
> binary is also steadily climbing.  On my system, a stripped postgres
> binary built with my usual compile options (except --enable-cassert,
> which I took out) is 49336 bytes bigger with this patch applied, an
> increase of close to 1%.

Do your usual compile options include debug symbols? I've been using
standard compile options for development of this patch, for obvious
reasons. I get 36690 bytes (just under 36 KiB, or a 0.644% increase).

Binary bloat is a legitimate concern. I thought that I was
conservative in my choice of specialisations though.

> We might need to be a little bit choosy
> about this, because I don't think that we want to end up with a
> situation where some noticeable percentage of the final binary
> consists of differently-inlined versions of the quicksort algorithm -
> especially because there may be other places where we want to do
> similar kinds of inlining.
>
> Thoughts?

A simple caveat in a comment along the lines of "this mechanism
instantiates 2 copies of qsort_arg per type, please use judiciously"
sounds like the right balance. It could also be possible to be penny
wise and pound foolish here though.

--
Peter Geoghegan       http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
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