Re: [PATCH] Add extra statistics to explain for Nested Loop

Hi,

On Fri, Jun 24, 2022 at 08:16:06PM +0300, Ekaterina Sokolova wrote:
>
> We started discussion about overheads and how to calculate it correctly.
>
> Julien Rouhaud wrote:
> > Can you give a bit more details on your bench scenario?
> > [...]
> > Ideally you would need a custom scenario with a single read-only query
> > involving a nested loop or something like that to check how much
> > overhead you
> > really get when you cumulate those values.
> I created 2 custom scenarios. First one contains VERBOSE flag so this
> scenario uses extra statistics. Second one doesn't use new feature and
> doesn't disable its use (therefore still collect data).
> I attach scripts for pgbench to this letter.

I don't think that this scenario is really representative for the problem I was
mentioning as you're only testing the overhead using the EXPLAIN (ANALYZE)
command, which doesn't say much about normal query execution.

I did a simple benchmark using a scale 50 pgbench on a pg_stat_statements
enabled instance, and the following scenario:

SET enable_mergejoin = off;
SELECT count(*) FROM pgbench_accounts JOIN pgbench_tellers on aid = tid;

(which forces a nested loop) and compared the result from this patch and fixing
pg_stat_statements to not request INSTRUMENT extra, something like:

diff --git a/contrib/pg_stat_statements/pg_stat_statements.c b/contrib/pg_stat_statements/pg_stat_statements.c
index 049da9fe6d..9a2177e438 100644
--- a/contrib/pg_stat_statements/pg_stat_statements.c
+++ b/contrib/pg_stat_statements/pg_stat_statements.c
@@ -985,7 +985,7 @@ pgss_ExecutorStart(QueryDesc *queryDesc, int eflags)
            MemoryContext oldcxt;

            oldcxt = MemoryContextSwitchTo(queryDesc->estate->es_query_cxt);
-           queryDesc->totaltime = InstrAlloc(1, INSTRUMENT_ALL, false);
+           queryDesc->totaltime = InstrAlloc(1, (INSTRUMENT_ALL & ~INSTRUMENT_EXTRA), false);
            MemoryContextSwitchTo(oldcxt);
        }
    }

It turns out that having pg_stat_statements with INSTRUMENT_EXTRA indirectly
requested by INSTRUMENT_ALL adds a ~27% overhead.

I'm not sure that I actually believe these results, but they're really
consistent, so maybe that's real.

Anyway, even if the overheadwas only 1.5% like in your own benchmark, that
still wouldn't be acceptable.  Such a feature is in my opinion very welcome,
but it shouldn't add *any* overhead outside of EXPLAIN (ANALYZE, VERBOSE).

Note that this was done using a "production build" (so with -02, without assert
and such).  Doing the same on a debug build (and a scale 20 pgbench), the
overhead is about 1.75%, which is closer to your result.  What was the
configure option you used for your benchmark?

Also, I don't think it's not acceptable to ask every single extension that
currently relies on INSTRUMENT_ALL to be patched and drop some random
INSTRUMENT_XXX flags to avoid this overhead.  So as I mentioned previously, I
think we should keep INSTRUMENT_ALL to mean something like "all instrumentation
that gives metrics at the statement level", and have INSTRUMENT_EXTRA be
outside of INSTRUMENT_ALL.  Maybe this new category should have a global flag
to request all of them, and maybe there should be some additional alias to grab
all categories.

While at it, INSTRUMENT_EXTRA doesn't really seem like a nice name either since
there's no guarantee that the next time someone adds a new instrument option
for per-node information, she will want to combine it with this one.  Maybe
INSTRUMENT_MINMAX_LOOPS or something like that?