Hi,
this is part of my work to make expression evaluation JITable. In a lot
of analytics queries the major bottleneck is transition function
invocation (makes sense, hardly anyone wants to see billions of
rows). Therefore for JITing to be really valuable transition function
stuff needs to be JITable.
Excerpt from the preliminary commit message:
Previously aggregate transition and combination functions were invoked
by special case code in nodeAgg.c, evaluting input and filters
separately using the expression evaluation machinery. That turns out
to not be great for performance for several reasons:
- repeated expression evaluations have some cost
- the transition functions invocations are poorly predicted
- filter and input computation had to be done separately
- the special case code made it hard to implement JITing of the whole
transition function invocation
Address this by building one large expression that computes input,
evaluates filters, and invokes transition functions.
This leads to moderate speedups in queries bottlenecked by aggregate
computations, and enables large speedups for similar cases once JITing
is done.
While this gets rid of a substantial amount of duplication between the
infrastructure for transition and combine functions, it still increases
codesize a bit.
Todo / open Questions:
- Location of transition function building functions. Currently they're
in execExpr.c. That allows not to expose a bunch of functions local to
it, but requires exposing some aggregate structs to the world. We
could go the other way round as well.
- Right now we waste a bunch of time by having to access transition
states indexed by both grouping set number and the transition state
offset therein. It'd be nicer if we could cheaply reduce the number of
indirections, but I can't quite see how without adding additional
complications.
Here's some example tpch Q01 timings:
master: 11628 ms (best of three)
patches: 10330 ms (best of three)
other tpch queries are similar, aggregate improvement is a factor of
x 1.04.
Greetings,
Andres Freund
