I wrote:
> I then applied the palloc.h and mcxt.c hunks of your patch and rebuilt.
> Now I get an average runtime of 16666 ms, a full 2% faster, which is a
> bit astonishing, particularly because the oprofile results haven't moved
> much:
I studied the assembly code being generated for palloc(), and I believe
I see the reason why it's a bit faster: when there's only a single local
variable that has to survive over the elog call, gcc generates a shorter
function entry/exit sequence. I had thought of proposing that we code
palloc() like this:
void *
palloc(Size size)
{ MemoryContext context = CurrentMemoryContext;
AssertArg(MemoryContextIsValid(context));
if (!AllocSizeIsValid(size)) elog(ERROR, "invalid memory alloc request size %lu", (unsigned long)
size);
context->isReset = false;
return (*context->methods->alloc) (context, size);
}
but at least on this specific hardware and compiler that would evidently
be a net loss compared to direct use of CurrentMemoryContext. I would
not put a lot of faith in that result holding up on other machines
though.
In any case this doesn't explain the whole 2% speedup, but it probably
accounts for palloc() showing as slightly cheaper than
MemoryContextAlloc had been in the oprofile listing.
regards, tom lane
