Re: BitmapHeapScan streaming read user and prelim refactoring

On Wed, Feb 28, 2024 at 6:17 PM Tomas Vondra
<tomas.vondra@enterprisedb.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On 2/28/24 21:06, Melanie Plageman wrote:
> > On Wed, Feb 28, 2024 at 2:23 PM Tomas Vondra
> > <tomas.vondra@enterprisedb.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> On 2/28/24 15:56, Tomas Vondra wrote:
> >>>> ...
> >>>
> >>> Sure, I can do that. It'll take a couple hours to get the results, I'll
> >>> share them when I have them.
> >>>
> >>
> >> Here are the results with only patches 0001 - 0012 applied (i.e. without
> >> the patch introducing the streaming read API, and the patch switching
> >> the bitmap heap scan to use it).
> >>
> >> The changes in performance don't disappear entirely, but the scale is
> >> certainly much smaller - both in the complete results for all runs, and
> >> for the "optimal" runs that would actually pick bitmapscan.
> >
> > Hmm. I'm trying to think how my refactor could have had this impact.
> > It seems like all the most notable regressions are with 4 parallel
> > workers. What do the numeric column labels mean across the top
> > (2,4,8,16...) -- are they related to "matches"? And if so, what does
> > that mean?
> >
>
> That's the number of distinct values matched by the query, which should
> be an approximation of the number of matching rows. The number of
> distinct values in the data set differs by data set, but for 1M rows
> it's roughly like this:
>
> uniform: 10k
> linear: 10k
> cyclic: 100
>
> So for example matches=128 means ~1% of rows for uniform/linear, and
> 100% for cyclic data sets.

Ah, thank you for the explanation. I also looked at your script after
having sent this email and saw that it is clear in your script what
"matches" is.

> As for the possible cause, I think it's clear most of the difference
> comes from the last patch that actually switches bitmap heap scan to the
> streaming read API. That's mostly expected/understandable, although we
> probably need to look into the regressions or cases with e_i_c=0.

Right, I'm mostly surprised about the regressions for patches 0001-0012.

Re eic 0: Thomas Munro and I chatted off-list, and you bring up a
great point about eic 0. In old bitmapheapscan code eic 0 basically
disabled prefetching but with the streaming read API, it will still
issue fadvises when eic is 0. That is an easy one line fix. Thomas
prefers to fix it by always avoiding an fadvise for the last buffer in
a range before issuing a read (since we are about to read it anyway,
best not fadvise it too). This will fix eic 0 and also cut one system
call from each invocation of the streaming read machinery.

> To analyze the 0001-0012 patches, maybe it'd be helpful to run tests for
> individual patches. I can try doing that tomorrow. It'll have to be a
> limited set of tests, to reduce the time, but might tell us whether it's
> due to a single patch or multiple patches.

Yes, tomorrow I planned to start trying to repro some of the "red"
cases myself. Any one of the commits could cause a slight regression
but a 3.5x regression is quite surprising, so I might focus on trying
to repro that locally and then narrow down which patch causes it.

For the non-cached regressions, perhaps the commit to use the correct
recheck flag (0004) when prefetching could be the culprit. And for the
cached regressions, my money is on the commit which changes the whole
control flow of BitmapHeapNext() and the next_block() and next_tuple()
functions (0010).

- Melanie