Re: Cost of XLogInsert CRC calculations

On Sun, 2005-03-06 at 00:17 -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> I was profiling a case involving UPDATEs into a table with too many
> indexes (brought to mind by mysql's sql-bench, about which more later)
> and got this rather surprising result for routines costing more than
> 1% of the total runtime:
>
> Each sample counts as 0.01 seconds.
> % cumulative self self total
> time seconds seconds calls s/call s/call name
> 64.03 86.20 86.20 133608 0.00 0.00 XLogInsert
> 3.50 90.91 4.71 2484787 0.00 0.00 _bt_compare
> 2.92 94.84 3.93 839893 0.00 0.00 hash_search
> 2.77 98.57 3.73 1875815 0.00 0.00 LWLockAcquire
> 1.89 101.12 2.55 1887972 0.00 0.00 LWLockRelease
> 1.27 102.83 1.71 125234 0.00 0.00 _bt_getroot
> 1.01 104.19 1.36 403342 0.00 0.00 PinBuffer
> 1.00 105.54 1.35 840002 0.00 0.00 hash_any
>
> I suppose that the bulk of the CPU cycles being attributed to XLogInsert
> are going into the inlined CRC calculations. Maybe we need to think
> twice about the cost/benefit ratio of using 64-bit CRCs to protect xlog
> records that are often only a few dozen bytes.

Yes, in recent performance tests sponsored by Unisys, this result was
also very clear. In those tests we used Intel VTune to identify the
precise lines of code soaking up the cycles...it was the CRC checks.

More results should be available from the Unisys testing within a few
days.

I had assumed that the majority of the cost of CRC checking was as a
result of the need to log complete blocks, rather than the rather small
xlog records themselves?

Best Regards, Simon Riggs