Re: Macro customizable hashtable / bitmapscan & aggregation perf - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

From Arthur Silva
Subject Re: Macro customizable hashtable / bitmapscan & aggregation perf
Date
Msg-id CAO_YK0W26BLJ5uzR3DSyhufmTVWWvivQ8we7-0VWAA4xcxh6Xg@mail.gmail.com
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In response to Re: Macro customizable hashtable / bitmapscan & aggregation perf  (Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>)
Responses Re: Macro customizable hashtable / bitmapscan & aggregation perf
List pgsql-hackers

On Sat, Oct 1, 2016 at 2:44 AM, Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de> wrote:
Hi,

On 2016-07-26 17:43:33 -0700, Andres Freund wrote:
> In the attached patch I've attached simplehash.h, which can be
> customized by a bunch of macros, before being inlined.  There's also a
> patch using this for tidbitmap.c and nodeAgg/nodeSubplan/... via
> execGrouping.c.

Attached is a significantly improved version of this series.  The main
changes are:

- The hash table now uses robin-hood style hash collision handling. See the
  commit message of 0002 (or simplehash.h) for an introduction. That
  significantly reduces the impact of "clustering" due to linear
  addressing.
- Significant comment and correctness fixes, both in simplehash.h
- itself, and 0003/0004.
- a lot of other random performance improvements for the hashing code.


Unfortunately I'm running out battery right now, so I don't want to
re-run the benchmarks posted upthread (loading takes a while). But the
last time I ran them all the results after the patches were better than
before.


This patch series currently consists out of four patches:
- 0001 - add unlikely/likely() macros. The use here is not entirely
  mandatory, but they do provide a quite consistent improvement. There
  are other threads where they proved to be beneficial, so I see little
  reason not to introduce them.
- 0002 - the customizable hashtable itself. It now contains documentation.
- 0003 - convert tidbitmap.c to use the new hashmap. This includes a fix
  for the issue mentioned in [1], to improve peformance in heavily lossy
  scenarios (otherwise we could regress in some extreme cases)
- 0004 - convert execGrouping.c, e.g. used by hash aggregates


While not quite perfect yet, I do think this is at a state where input
is needed.  I don't want to go a lot deeper into this rabbit hole,
before we have some agreement that this is a sensible course of action.


I think there's several possible additional users of simplehash.h,
e.g. catcache.c - which has an open coded, not particularly fast hash
table and frequently shows up in profiles - but I think the above two
conversions are plenty to start with.


Comments?


Greetings,

Andres Freund

[1] http://archives.postgresql.org/message-id/20160923205843.zcs533sqdzlh4cpo%40alap3.anarazel.de


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This is a great addition.

A couple of comments.

* 80% occupancy is a bit conservative for RH hashing, it works well up to 90% if you use the early stops due to distance. So that TODO is worth pursuing.

* An optimized memory layout for RH hashmap is along the lines of HHHKVKVKV, using one bit of the hash as the present/absent flag. That plays specially well with large occupancies (~90%). Due to RH the probings on the H array are very short and within a single cache line. Even with a 31bit hash it's reallyyy rare to have to probe more than 1 entry in the KV array. Essentially guaranteeing that the 99% percentile of lookups will only hit a couple of cache lines (if you ignore crossing cache lines and other details).

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