Hi!
In a thread about sorting comparators[0] Andres noted that we have infrastructure to help compiler optimize sorting.
PFAattached PoC implementation. I've checked that it indeed works on the benchmark from that thread.
postgres=# CREATE TABLE arrays_to_sort AS
SELECT array_shuffle(a) arr
FROM
(SELECT ARRAY(SELECT generate_series(1, 1000000)) a),
generate_series(1, 10);
postgres=# SELECT (sort(arr))[1] FROM arrays_to_sort; -- original
Time: 990.199 ms
postgres=# SELECT (sort(arr))[1] FROM arrays_to_sort; -- patched
Time: 696.156 ms
The benefit seems to be on the order of magnitude with 30% speedup.
There's plenty of sorting by TransactionId, BlockNumber, OffsetNumber, Oid etc. But this sorting routines never show up
inperf top or something like that.
Seems like in most cases we do not spend much time in sorting. But specialization does not cost us much too, only some
CPUcycles of a compiler. I think we can further improve speedup by converting inline comparator to value extractor:
morecompilers will see what is actually going on. But I have no proofs for this reasoning.
What do you think?
Best regards, Andrey Borodin.
[0]
https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/20240209184014.sobshkcsfjix6u4r%40awork3.anarazel.de#fc23df2cf314bef35095b632380b4a59
