On Tue, Dec 31, 2013 at 2:41 PM, Andreas Karlsson <andreas@proxel.se> wrote:
On 12/29/2013 08:24 AM, David Rowley wrote:
If it was possible to devise some way to reuse any previous tuplesortstate perhaps just inventing a reset method which clears out tuples, then we could see performance exceed the standard seqscan -> sort. The code the way it is seems to lookup the sort functions from the syscache for each group then allocate some sort space, so quite a bit of time is also spent in palloc0() and pfree()
If it was not possible to do this then maybe adding a cost to the number of sort groups would be better so that the optimization is skipped if there are too many sort groups.
It should be possible. I have hacked a quick proof of concept for reusing the tuplesort state. Can you try it and see if the performance regression is fixed by this?
One thing which have to be fixed with my patch is that we probably want to close the tuplesort once we have returned the last tuple from ExecSort().
I have attached my patch and the incremental patch on Alexander's patch.
Thanks, the attached is about 5 times faster than it was previously with my test case upthread.
The times now look like:
No pre-sortable index:
Total runtime: 86.278 ms
With pre-sortable index with partial sorting
Total runtime: 47.500 ms
With the query where there is no index the sort remained in memory.
I spent some time trying to find a case where the partial sort is slower than the seqscan -> sort. The only places partial sort seems slower are when the number of estimated sort groups are around the crossover point where the planner would be starting to think about performing a seqscan -> sort instead. I'm thinking right now that it's not worth raising the costs around this as the partial sort is less likely to become a disk sort than the full sort is.
