Re: Top -N Query performance issue and high CPU usage - Mailing list pgsql-general

From yudhi s
Subject Re: Top -N Query performance issue and high CPU usage
Date
Msg-id CAEzWdqeSoEy=_67u1i2vvE8Jk7+hQdyeuTYxaRDWm3+ghLe2gw@mail.gmail.com
Whole thread
In response to Re: Top -N Query performance issue and high CPU usage  (Adrian Klaver <adrian.klaver@aklaver.com>)
Responses Re: Top -N Query performance issue and high CPU usage
Re: Top -N Query performance issue and high CPU usage
List pgsql-general


On Tue, 3 Feb, 2026, 9:37 pm Adrian Klaver, <adrian.klaver@aklaver.com> wrote:
On 2/3/26 07:59, Ron Johnson wrote:

>
>
> There is no VARCHAR or CHAR; there is only TEXT.  Thus, this is 100%
> expected and normal.

What Ron is saying is that there are varchar and char types, but they
boil down to text per:

https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/datatype-character.html

"text is PostgreSQL's native string data type, in that most built-in
functions operating on strings are declared to take or return text not
character varying. For many purposes, character varying acts as though
it were a domain over text."

As to performance see:

"
Tip

There is no performance difference among these three types, apart from
increased storage space when using the blank-padded type, and a few
extra CPU cycles to check the length when storing into a
length-constrained column. While character(n) has performance advantages
in some other database systems, there is no such advantage in
PostgreSQL; in fact character(n) is usually the slowest of the three
because of its additional storage costs. In most situations text or
character varying should be used instead.
"

Thank you. I was looking into those casting(::text) in the explain plan output in similar way (as it was happening for int8 to numeric join scenario) and was thinking, may be it's spending some cpu cycles on doing these ::text casting behind the scenes for that column and if there is someway(data type change) to stop those. But from your explanation, it looks like those representation in the query plan is normal and have no performance overhead as such. Thanks again. 

In regards to the below, "nested loop" having response time of 100ms. I understand, here the casting function us now removed after changing the data type of columns to match in both side of the join.

So, is this expected to do a nested loop on 500k rows to take 100ms?

->  Nested Loop  (cost=262.77..1342550.91 rows=579149 width=20) (actual time=6.406..107.946 rows=1049 loops=1)
              Join Filter: (df.ent_id = m.ent_id)
              Rows Removed by Join Filter: 514648
              Buffers: shared hit=1972

Regards
Yudhi



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