On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 11:30 AM, Amit Langote <amitlangote09@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 6:02 AM, Jeff Janes <jeff.janes@gmail.com> wrote:
>> If you are using trace_sort to report that, it reports the switch as
>> happening as soon as it runs out of memory.
>>
>> At point, all we have been doing is reading tuples into memory. The
>> time it takes to do that will depend on maintenance_work_mem, because
>> that affects how many tuples fit in memory. But all the rest of the
>> tuples need to be read sooner or later anyway, so pushing more of them
>> to later doesn't improve things overall it just shifts timing around.
>>
>> After it reports the switch, it still needs to heapify the existing
>> in-memory tuples before the tapesort proper can begin. This is where
>> the true lost opportunities start to arise, as the large heap starts
>> driving cache misses which would not happen at all under different
>> settings.
>>
>> Once the existing tuples are heapified, it then continues to use the
>> heap to pop tuples from it to write out to "tape", and to push newly
>> read tuples onto it. This also suffers lost opportunities.
>>
>> Once all the tuples are written out and it starts merging, then the
>> large maintenance_work_mem is no longer a penalty as the new heap is
>> limited by the number of tapes, which is almost always much smaller.
>> In fact this stage will actually be faster, but not by enough to make
>> up for the earlier slow down.
>>
>> So it is not surprising that the time before the switch is reported is
>> a small part of the overall time difference.
>>
>
> So, is it the actual sorting (before merging) that suffers with larger
> maintenance_work_mem? I am sorry but I can not grasp the complexity of
> external sort code at this point, so all I can say is that during an
> external sort a smaller value of maintenance_work_mem is beneficial
> (based on my observations in tests). But how that follows from what is
> going on in the implementation of external sort is still something I
> am working on understanding.
>
Or does the increased create index time follow from something else
altogether (not any part of external sort) may be still another
question. Since we have to relate that to maintenance_work_mem, the
first thing I could think of was to look at sorting part of it.
--
Amit Langote