Re: Scanner performance (was Re: 7.3 schedule) - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

From Tom Lane
Subject Re: Scanner performance (was Re: 7.3 schedule)
Date
Msg-id 3531.1019019898@sss.pgh.pa.us
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: Scanner performance (was Re: 7.3 schedule)  (Peter Eisentraut <peter_e@gmx.net>)
List pgsql-hackers
Peter Eisentraut <peter_e@gmx.net> writes:
> Top ten calls:

>   %   cumulative   self              self     total
>  time   seconds   seconds    calls  ms/call  ms/call  name
>  36.95      9.87     9.87 74882482     0.00     0.00  pq_getbyte
>  22.80     15.96     6.09       11   553.64  1450.93  pq_getstring
>  13.55     19.58     3.62       11   329.09   329.10  scanstr
>  12.09     22.81     3.23      110    29.36    86.00  base_yylex
>   4.27     23.95     1.14       34    33.53    33.53  yy_get_previous_state
>   3.86     24.98     1.03       22    46.82    46.83  textin
>   3.67     25.96     0.98       34    28.82    28.82  myinput
>   1.83     26.45     0.49       45    10.89    32.67  yy_get_next_buffer
>   0.11     26.48     0.03     3027     0.01     0.01  AllocSetAlloc
>   0.11     26.51     0.03      129     0.23     0.23  fmgr_isbuiltin

Interesting.  This should be taken with a grain of salt however: gprof's
call-counting overhead is large enough to skew the results on many
machines (ie, routines that are called many times tend to show more than
their fair share of runtime).  If your profiler does not show the
counter subroutine ("mcount" or some similar name) separately, you
should be very suspicious of where the overhead time is hidden.

For comparison you might want to check out some similar numbers I
obtained awhile back:
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2001-12/msg00076.php
(thanks to Barry Lind for reminding me about that ;-)).  That test
showed base_yylex/addlit/scanstr as costing about twice as much as
pg_getstring/pq_getbyte.  Probably the truth is somewhere in between
your measurements and mine.

In any case it does seem that some micro-optimization in the vicinity of
the scanner's per-character costs, ie, pq_getbyte, addlit, etc would be
worth the trouble.
        regards, tom lane


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