Re: Re: Re: Generic Plans for Prepared Statement are 158155 times slower than Custom Plans

wow this is interesting! 
@Tom, Bruce, David - Experts
Any idea why would changing the datatype would cause so much degradation - this is even when plan remains the same ,data is same.
Deepak
On Friday, May 17, 2019, 2:36:05 AM PDT, Naik, Sameer <Sameer_Naik(at)bmc(dot)com> wrote:


Deepak,

I changed the datatype from citext to text and now everything works fine.

The data distribution is same, plan is same, yet there is a huge performance degradation when citext is used instead of text.

However the business case requires case insensitive string handling.

I am looking forward to some expert advice here when dealing with citext data type.

 

 

-Thanks and Regards,

Sameer Naik

 

From: Deepak Somaiya [mailto:deepsom(at)yahoo(dot)com]
Sent: Thursday, May 9, 2019 9:44 AM
To: Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us>; Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us>; Naik, Sameer <Sameer_Naik(at)bmc(dot)com>
Cc: pgsql-performance(at)lists(dot)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: Re: Generic Plans for Prepared Statement are 158155 times slower than Custom Plans

 

Sameer,

were you able to resolve it?

 

I am not sure if this is very common in postges  - I doubt though but have not seen such a drastic performance degradation and that too when planner making the call. 

 

Deepak

 

 

On Tuesday, April 30, 2019, 1:27:14 AM PDT, Naik, Sameer <Sameer_Naik(at)bmc(dot)com> wrote:

 

 

>The problem seems to be that the actual values being used for
>c400129200 and c400127400 are quite common in the dataset, so that when considering

>Filter: ... (c400129200 = '0'::citext) AND (c400127400 = 'DATASET1M'::citext)

>the planner makes a roughly correct assessment that there are a lot of such rows, so it prefers to index on the basis of the giant OR clause instead, even though that's fairly expensive.  But, when considering the generic case

>      ->  Index Scan using i776_0_400129200_t776 on t776  (cost=0.42..12.66 rows=1 width=52) (actual time=1190.399..5544.385 rows=48 loops=1)
>            Index Cond: ((c400129200 = $1) AND (c400127400 = $2))

> it's evidently guessing that just a few rows will match the index condition (no more than about 3 given the cost number), making this plan look much cheaper, so it goes with this plan.  I wonder what the actual distribution of those keys is.

Distribution of the keys c400129200 and c400127400 .

The distribution of c400129200 is as follows-
In entire table having 110743 records, there are 55370 records for which the value of c400129200 is 0. For each of the remaining 55,373 records the value of c400129200 is distinct.

The distribution of c400127400 is as follows-
In entire table having 110743 records, there are 55370 records for which the value of c400127400 is  'DATASET1M' . For remaining 55,373 records the value of c400127400 the value is same and is ' 'DATASET2M'  .

-Thanks and Regards,
Sameer Naik

-----Original Message-----
From: Tom Lane [mailto:tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us]
Sent: Monday, April 29, 2019 8:06 PM
To: Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us>
Cc: Naik, Sameer <Sameer_Naik(at)bmc(dot)com>;pgsql-performance(at)lists(dot)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: Generic> Plans for Prepared Statement are 158155 times slower than Custom Plans

Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> writes:
> On Mon, Apr 29, 2019 at 10:36:20AM +0000, Naik, Sameer wrote:
>> Since Postgres 9.2, for prepared statements, the CBO automatically
>> switches from Custom Plan to Generic plan on the sixth iteration
>> (reference backend/ utils/cache/plancache.c).

> This is not totally true.

Yeah, that's a pretty inaccurate statement of the behavior.

The problem seems to be that the actual values being used for
c400129200 and c400127400 are quite common in the dataset, so that when considering

Filter: ... (c400129200 = '0'::citext) AND (c400127400 = 'DATASET1M'::citext)

the planner makes a roughly correct assessment that there are a lot of such rows, so it prefers to index on the basis of the giant OR clause instead, even though that's fairly expensive.  But, when considering the generic case

      ->  Index Scan using i776_0_400129200_t776 on t776  (cost=0.42..12.66 rows=1 width=52) (actual time=1190.399..5544.385 rows=48 loops=1)
            Index Cond: ((c400129200 = $1) AND (c400127400 = $2))

it's evidently guessing that just a few rows will match the index condition (no more than about 3 given the cost number), making this plan look much cheaper, so it goes with this plan.  I wonder what the actual distribution of those keys is.

In v10 and later, it's quite possible that creating extended stats on the combination of those two columns would produce a better estimate.  Won't help OP on 9.6, though.

This isn't the first time we've seen a plan-choice failure of this sort.
I've wondered if we should make the plancache simply disbelieve generic cost estimates that are actually cheaper than the custom plans, on the grounds that they must be estimation errors.  In principle a generic plan could never really be better than a custom plan; so if it looks that way on a cost basis, what that probably means is that the actual parameter values are outliers of some sort (e.g. extremely common), and the custom plan "knows" that it's going to be taking a hit from that, but the generic plan doesn't.  In this sort of situation, going with the generic plan could be really disastrous, which is exactly what the OP is seeing (and what we've seen reported before).

However, I'm not sure how to tune this idea so that it doesn't end up rejecting perfectly good generic plans.  It's likely that there will be some variation in the cost estimates between the generic and specific cases, even if the plan structure is exactly the same; and that variation could go in either direction.

            regards, tom lane