On Fri, Jun 15, 2012 at 12:22 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> Peter Geoghegan <peter@2ndquadrant.com> writes:
>> On 14 June 2012 19:28, Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> I thought that doubling repeatedly would be overly aggressive in terms
>>> of memory usage.
>
>> I fail to understand how this sortsupport buffer fundamentally differs
>> from a generic dynamic array abstraction built to contain chars. That
>> being the case, I see no reason not to just do what everyone else does
>> when expanding dynamic arrays, and no reason why we shouldn't make
>> essentially the same time-space trade-off here as others do elsewhere.
>
> I agree with Peter on this one; not only is double-each-time the most
> widespread plan, but it is what we do in just about every other place
> in Postgres that needs a dynamically expansible buffer. If you do it
> randomly differently here, readers of the code will be constantly
> stopping to wonder why it's different here and if that's a bug or not.
That could, of course, be addressed by adding a comment.
> (And from a performance standpoint, I'm not entirely convinced it's not
> a bug, anyway. Worst-case behavior could be pretty bad.)
Instead of simply asserting that, could you respond to the specific
points raised in my analysis? I think there's no way it can be bad.
I am happy to be proven wrong, but I like to understand why it is that
I am wrong before changing things.
--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
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