Darafei "Komяpa" Praliaskouski <me@komzpa.net> writes: > I'm looking at PostGIS geometry GiST index build times and try to optimize > withing the current GiST framework. The function that shows a lot on my > flame graphs is penalty.
> However I cannot get any meaningfully faster build time. Even when I strip > it to "just return edge extension" index build time is the same.
TBH this makes me wonder whether the real problem isn't so much "penalty function is too slow" as "penalty function is resulting in really bad index splits".
As an extension writer I don't have much control on how Postgres calls penalty function. PostGIS box is using floats instead of doubles, so its size is twice as small as postgres builtin box, meaning penalty is called even more often on better packed pages.
I can get index construction speed to be much faster if I break penalty to actually result in horrible splits: index size grows 50%, construction is 30% faster.
It might be that giving the opclass higher-level control over the split decision can help with both aspects.
Please note the question is not about split. Korotkov's split is working fine. Issue is with penalty and computations required for choosing the subtree before split happens.
Andrey Borodin proposed off-list that we can provide our own index type that is a copy of GiST but with penalty inlined into "choose subtree" code path, as that seems to be the only way to do it in PG12. Is there a more humane option than forking GiST?
But never start micro-optimizing an algorithm until you're sure it's the right algorithm.
That's exactly the reason I write original letter. I don't see any option for further optimization in existing GiST framework, but this optimization is needed: waiting 10 hours for GiST to build after an hour of ingesting the dataset is frustrating, especially when you see a nearby b-tree done in an hour.
