Re: Slowness of extended protocol

Andres Freund <andres(at)anarazel(dot)de> writes:
> FWIW, I've observed the same with (a bit) more complicated queries. A
> part of this is that the extended protocol simply does
> more. PQsendQueryGuts() sends Parse/Bind/Describe/Execute/Sync - that's
> simply more work and data over the wire than a single Q message.

Yeah. The extended query protocol was designed to offer a lot of
functionality that people had asked for, like plan re-use and
introspection of the data types assigned to query parameters, but that
doesn't come at zero cost. I think the tie-in to the plan cache is a
significant part of the added overhead, and so is the fact that we have to
iterate the per-message loop in PostgresMain five times not once, with
overheads like updating the process title incurred several times in that.

In hindsight it seems clear that what a lot of apps want out of extended
protocol is only the ability to send parameter values out-of-line instead
of having to quote/escape them into SQL literals. Maybe an idea for the
fabled V4 protocol update is some compromise query type that corresponds
precisely to PQexecParams's feature set: you can send parameter values
out-of-line, and you can specify text or binary results, but there's no
notion of any persistent state being created and no feedback about
parameter data types.

regards, tom lane