Re: WIP: Faster Expression Processing v4 - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

On 2017-03-25 12:22:15 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> More random musing ... have you considered making the jump-target fields
> in expressions be relative rather than absolute indexes?  That is,
> EEO_JUMP would look like
> 
>         op += (stepno); \
>         EEO_DISPATCH(); \
> 
> instead of
> 
>         op = &state->steps[stepno]; \
>         EEO_DISPATCH(); \
> 
> I have not carried out a full patch to make this work, but just making
> that one change and examining the generated assembly code looks promising.
> Instead of this
> 
>     movslq    40(%r14), %r8
>     salq    $6, %r8
>     addq    24(%rbx), %r8
>     movq    %r8, %r14
>     jmp    *(%r8)
> 
> we get this
> 
>     movslq    40(%r14), %rax
>     salq    $6, %rax
>     addq    %rax, %r14
>     jmp    *(%r14)

That seems like a good idea.  I've not done this in the committed
version (and I don't think we necessarily need to this before the
release), but fo rthe future it seems like a good plan.  It makes sense
that it's faster - there's no need to reference state->steps.


> which certainly looks like it ought to be faster.  Also, the real reason
> I got interested in this at all is that with relative jumps, groups of
> steps would be position-independent within the steps array, which would
> enable some compile-time tricks that seem impractical with the current
> definition.

Indeed.


> BTW, now that I've spent a bit of time looking at the generated assembly
> code, I'm kind of disinclined to believe any arguments about how we have
> better control over branch prediction with the jump-threading
> implementation.

I measured the performance difference between using it and not using it,
and it came out a pretty clear plus. On gcc 6.3, gcc master snapshot,
and clang-3.9.  It's not just that more jumps are duplicated, it's also
that the switch() always adds a boundary check.


> At least with current gcc (6.3.1 on Fedora 25) at -O2,
> what I see is multiple places jumping to the same indirect jump
> instruction :-(.  It's not a total disaster: as best I can tell, all the
> uses of EEO_JUMP remain distinct.  But gcc has chosen to implement about
> 40 of the 71 uses of EEO_NEXT by jumping to the same couple of
> instructions that increment the "op" register and then do an indirect
> jump :-(.

Yea, I see some of that too - "usually" when there's more than just the
jump in common.  I think there's some gcc variables that influence this
(min-crossjump-insns (5), max-goto-duplication-insns (8)).  Might be
worthwhile experimenting with setting them locally via a pragma or such.
I think Aants wanted to experiment with that, too.

Then there's also https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=71785
which causes some forms of computed goto (not ours I think) to be
deoptimized in gcc.


Greetings,

Andres Freund