Hi,
When running workloads that include fast queries with a lot of columns,
SendRowDescriptionMessage(), and the routines it calls, becomes a
bottleneck. Besides syscache lookups (see [1] and [2]) a major cost of
that is manipulation of the StringBuffer and the version specific
branches in the per-attribute loop. As so often, the performance
differential of this patch gets bigger when the other performance
patches are applied.
The issues in SendRowDescriptionMessage() are the following:
1) All the pq_sendint calls, and also the pq_sendstring, are
expensive. The amount of calculations done for a single 2/4 byte
addition to the stringbuffer (particularly enlargeStringInfo()) is
problematic, as are the reallocations themselves.
I addressed this by adding pq_send*_pre() wrappers, implemented as
inline functions, that require that memory is pre-allocated.
Combining that with doing a enlargeStringInfo() in
SendRowDescriptionMessage() that pre-allocates the maximum required
memory, yields pretty good speedup.
I'm not yet super sure about the implementation. For one, I'm not
sure this shouldn't instead be stringinfo.h functions, with very very
tiny pqformat.h wrappers. But conversely I think it'd make a lot of
sense for the pqformat integer functions to get rid of the
continually maintained trailing null-byte - I was hoping the compiler
could optimize that away, but alas, no luck. As soon as a single
integer is sent, you can't rely on 0 terminated strings anyway.
2) It creates a new StringInfo in every iteration. That causes
noticeable memory management overhead, and restarts the size of the
buffer every time. When the description is relatively large, that
leads to a number of reallocations for every
SendRowDescriptionMessage() call.
My solution here was to create persistent StringInfo for
SendRowDescriptionMessage() that never gets deallocated (just
reset). That in combination with new versions of
pq_beginmessage/endmessage that keep the buffer alive, yields a nice
speedup.
Currently I'm using a static variable to allocate a string buffer for
the function. It'd probably better to manage that outside of a single
function - I'm also wondering why we're allocating a good number of
stringinfos in various places, rather than reuse them. Most of them
can't be entered recursively, and even if that's a concern, we could
have one reusable per portal or such.
3) The v2/v3 branches in the attribute loop are noticeable (others too,
but well...). I solved that by splitting out the v2 and v3
per-attribute loops into separate functions. Imo also a good chunk
more readable.
Comments?
Greetings,
Andres Freund
[1] http://archives.postgresql.org/message-id/CA+Tgmobj72E_tG6w98H0oUbCCUmoC4uRmjocYPbnWC2RxYACeg@mail.gmail.com
[2] http://archives.postgresql.org/message-id/20170914061207.zxotvyopetm7lrrp%40alap3.anarazel.de
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