Re: 8.3 / 8.2.6 restore comparison - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

Added to TODO:

>       o Impove COPY performance
>
>         http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2008-02/msg00954.php


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Heikki Linnakangas wrote:
> Bruce Momjian wrote:
> > Heikki, are there any TODO items here?
> 
> Hmm. You could put an entry there for "profile and optimize COPY", with 
> the below list of ideas as a starting point. It's more about profiling 
> and performance testing than coding.
> 
> > ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
> > 
> > Heikki Linnakangas wrote:
> >> Joshua D. Drake wrote:
> >>> On Sun, 24 Feb 2008 00:43:18 +0000
> >>> "Heikki Linnakangas" <heikki@enterprisedb.com> wrote:
> >>>  
> >>>> Incidentally, I've been working on a patch to speed up CopyReadLine.
> >>>> I was going to run some more tests first, but since we're talking
> >>>> about it, I guess I should just post the patch. I'll post to
> >>>> pgsql-patches shortly.
> >>> On your post to patches you mentioned only about a 5% improvement.
> >>> Don't get me wrong, 5% is 5% and I respect it greatly but as far as I
> >>> can tell we are about 300% behind the curve.
> >> Yeah. Looking at the profile, the time is spent really all over the 
> >> place. There's no one clear bottleneck to focus on. I think we could do 
> >> a few more ~5% improvements, but
> >>
> >> At some point, I think we have to bite the bullet and find a way to use 
> >> multiple CPUs for a single load. I don't have any good ideas or plans 
> >> for that, but hopefully someone does.
> >>
> >>> My tests were maxing out at ~22G an hour. On hardware that can do 
> >>> in 360G an hour and that is assuming > 50% overhead between OS, libs,
> >>> etc... I have no choice but to conclude we have a much, much deeper and
> >>> fundamental issue going on with COPY. I am inspired by Itagaki Takahiro
> >>> and his batch update of indexes which should help greatly overall but
> >>> doesn't help my specific issue.
> >> Yep, the index build idea is an I/O improvement, not a CPU one.
> >>
> >>> Forgive me for not being a C programmer and Alvaro is not online so I
> >>> would vet these questions with him first.
> >>>
> >>> I know that copy is in theory a bulk loader but, when performing the
> >>> readline how many lines are we reading?  Do we read up to 8192? Or do we
> >>> shove in say 8megs of data before we invoke DoCopy?
> >> We read 64 KB at a time, and then CopyReadLineText returns one line at a 
> >> time from that buffer.
> >>
> >> Looking at your profile more, and after the memchr patch, the "raw input 
> >> side" of copy, consisting of reading the data from disk in 64KB blocks, 
> >> splitting that into lines, and splitting lines into columns, still takes 
> >> ~20% of the CPU time. I suspect CopyReadAttributesText is the biggest 
> >> culprit there.
> >>
> >> You could avoid the ~8% spent in XLogInsert in PostgreSQL 8.3, by 
> >> creating the table (or truncating it) in the same transaction with the COPY.
> >>
> >> After that, heap_formtuple is high on the list. I wonder if we could do 
> >> something about that.
> >>
> >>> I am just curious if there is some simple low hanging fruit that is
> >>> possibly missing.
> >> I don't see any piece of code that's causing problems. We can shave off 
> >> a few percents here and there I think, but don't expect a 300% 
> >> improvement anytime soon. A few ideas I've thought about are:
> >>
> >> - use a specialized version of strtol, for base 10. That won't help on 
> >> your table, but I've seen strtol consume a significant amount of time on 
> >> tables with numeric/integer columns.
> >>
> >> - Instead of pallocing and memcpying the text fields, leave a little bit 
> >> of room between fields in the attribute_buf, and write the varlen header 
> >> there directly. This might help you since your table has a lot of text 
> >> fields.
> >>
> >> - Instead of the normal PG function calling conventions, provide 
> >> specialized fastpath input functions for the most common data types. 
> >> InputFunctionCall consumed 4.5% of the CPU time in your profile.
> >>
> >> - Use a simpler memory context implementation, that's like a stack with 
> >> no pfree support, for the per-tuple context.
> >>
> >> -- 
> >>    Heikki Linnakangas
> >>    EnterpriseDB   http://www.enterprisedb.com
> >>
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> > 
> 
> 
> -- 
>    Heikki Linnakangas
>    EnterpriseDB   http://www.enterprisedb.com

--  Bruce Momjian  <bruce@momjian.us>        http://momjian.us EnterpriseDB
http://enterprisedb.com
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