Re: 9.5: Better memory accounting, towards memory-bounded HashAgg

On Sat, 2014-11-15 at 21:36 +0000, Simon Riggs wrote:
> Do I understand correctly that we are trying to account for exact
> memory usage at palloc/pfree time? Why??

Not palloc chunks, only tracking at the level of allocated blocks (that
we allocate with malloc).

It was a surprise to me that accounting at that level would have any
measurable impact, but Robert found a reasonable case on a POWER machine
that degraded a couple percent. I wasn't able to reproduce it
consistently on x86.

> Or alternatively, can't we just sample the allocations to reduce the overhead?

Not sure quite what you mean by "sample", but it sounds like something
along those lines would work.

Attached is a patch that does something very simple: only tracks blocks
held in the current context, with no inheritance or anything like it.
This reduces it to a couple arithmetic instructions added to the
alloc/dealloc path, so hopefully that removes the general performance
concern raised by Robert[1].

To calculate the total memory used, I included a function
MemoryContextMemAllocated() that walks the memory context and its
children recursively.

Of course, I was originally trying to avoid that, because it moves the
problem to HashAgg. For each group, it will need to execute
MemoryContextMemAllocated() to see if work_mem has been exceeded. It
will have to visit a couple contexts, or perhaps many (in the case of
array_agg, which creates one per group), which could be a measurable
regression for HashAgg.

But if that does turn out to be a problem, I think it's solvable. First,
I could micro-optimize the function by making it iterative rather than
recursive, to save on function call overhead. Second, I could offer a
way to prevent the HTAB from creating its own context, which would be
one less context to visit. And if those don't work, perhaps I could
resort to a sampling method of some kind, as you allude to above.

Regards,
Jeff Davis

[1] I'm fairly sure I tested something very similar on Robert's POWER
machine a while ago, and it was fine. But I think it's offline or moved
now, so I can't verify the results. If this patch still somehow turns
out to be a 1%+ regression on any reasonable test, I don't know what to
say.