Re: Make tuple deformation faster

On Mon, 1 Jul 2024 at 22:07, Matthias van de Meent
<boekewurm+postgres@gmail.com> wrote:
> Cool, that's similar to, but even better than, my patch from 2021 over at [0].

I'll have a read of that. Thanks for pointing it out.

> One thing I'm slightly concerned about is that this allocates another
> 8 bytes for each attribute in the tuple descriptor. While that's not a
> lot when compared with the ->attrs array, it's still quite a lot when
> we might not care at all about this data; e.g. in temporary tuple
> descriptors during execution, in intermediate planner nodes.

I've not done it in the patch, but one way to get some of that back is
to ditch pg_attribute.attcacheoff. There's no need for it after this
patch.  That's only 4 out of 8 bytes, however. I think in most cases
due to FormData_pg_attribute being so huge, the aset.c power-of-2
roundup behaviour will be unlikely to cross a power-of-2 boundary.

The following demonstrates which column counts that actually makes a
difference with:

select c as n_cols,old_bytes, new_bytes from (select c,24+104*c as
old_bytes, 32+100*c+8*c as new_bytes from generate_series(1,1024) c)
where position('1' in old_bytes::bit(32)::text) != position('1' in
new_bytes::bit(32)::text);

That returns just 46 column counts out of 1024 where we cross a power
of 2 boundaries with the patched code that we didn't cross in master.
Of course, larger pallocs will result in a malloc() directly, so
perhaps that's not a good measure.  At least for smaller column counts
it should be mainly the same amount of memory used. There are only 6
rows in there for column counts below 100. I think if we were worried
about memory there are likely 100 other things we could do to reclaim
some. It would only take some shuffling of fields in RelationData. I
count 50 bytes of holes in that struct out of the 488 bytes. There are
probably a few that could be moved without upsetting the
struct-field-order-lords too much.

> Did you test for performance gains (or losses) with an out-of-line
> TupleDescDeformAttr array? One benefit from this would be that we
> could reuse the deform array for suffix truncated TupleDescs, reuse of
> which currently would require temporarily updating TupleDesc->natts
> with a smaller value; but with out-of-line ->attrs and ->deform_attrs,
> we could reuse these arrays between TupleDescs if one is shorter than
> the other, but has otherwise fully matching attributes. I know that
> btree split code would benefit from this, as it wouldn't have to
> construct a full new TupleDesc when it creates a suffix-truncated
> tuple during page splits.

No, but it sounds easy to test as patch 0002 moves that out of line
and does nothing else.

> > 0004: Adjusts the attalign to change it from char to uint8.  See below.
> >
> > The 0004 patch changes the TupleDescDeformAttr.attalign to a uint8
> > rather than a char containing 'c', 's', 'i' or 'd'. This allows much
> > more simple code in the att_align_nominal() macro. What's in master is
> > quite a complex expression to evaluate every time we deform a column
> > as it much translate: 'c' -> 1, 's' -> 2, 'i' -> 4, 'd' -> 8. If we
> > just store that numeric value in the struct that macro can become a
> > simple TYPEALIGN() so the operation becomes simple bit masking rather
> > than a poorly branch predictable series of compare and jump.
>
> +1, that's something I'd missed in my patches, and is probably the
> largest contributor to the speedup.

I think so too and I did consider if we should try and do that to
pg_attribute, renaming the column to attalignby. I started but didn't
finish a patch for that.

> > I'll stick this in the July CF. It would be good to get some feedback
> > on the idea and feedback on whether more work on this is worthwhile.
>
> Do you plan to remove the ->attcacheoff catalog field from the
> FormData_pg_attribute, now that (with your patch) it isn't used
> anymore as a placeholder field for fast (de)forming of tuples?

Yes, I plan to do that once I get more confidence I'm on to a winner here.

Thanks for having a look at this.

David