Thread: Re: Terrible performance on wide selects

Re: Terrible performance on wide selects

From
Tom Lane
Date:
Steve Crawford sent me some profiling results for queries involving wide
tuples (hundreds of columns).

> Done, results attached. nocachegetattr seems to be the likely suspect.

Yipes, you can say that again.

  %   cumulative   self              self     total
 time   seconds   seconds    calls  ms/call  ms/call  name
 93.38     26.81    26.81   885688     0.03     0.03  nocachegetattr

                0.00    0.00       1/885688      heapgettup [159]
                0.00    0.00       1/885688      CatalogCacheComputeTupleHashValue [248]
                0.00    0.00       5/885688      SearchCatCache [22]
               13.40    0.00  442840/885688      ExecEvalVar [20]
               13.40    0.00  442841/885688      printtup [12]
[11]    93.4   26.81    0.00  885688         nocachegetattr [11]


Half of the calls are coming from printtup(), which seems relatively easy
to fix.

    /*
     * send the attributes of this tuple
     */
    for (i = 0; i < natts; ++i)
    {
        ...
        origattr = heap_getattr(tuple, i + 1, typeinfo, &isnull);
        ...
    }

The trouble here is that in the presence of variable-width fields,
heap_getattr requires a linear scan over the tuple --- and so the total
time spent in it is O(N^2) in the number of fields.

What we could do is reinstitute heap_deformtuple() as the inverse of
heap_formtuple() --- but make it extract Datums for all the columns in
a single pass over the tuple.  This would reduce the time in printtup()
from O(N^2) to O(N), which would pretty much wipe out that part of the
problem.

The other half of the calls are coming from ExecEvalVar, which is a
harder problem to solve, since those calls are scattered all over the
place.  It's harder to see how to get them to share work.  Any ideas
out there?

            regards, tom lane