Re: ATTN: Clodaldo was Performance problem. Could it be related to 8.3-beta4?

Added to TODO:

* Consider sorting entries before inserting into btree index

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-general/2008-01/msg01010.php

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Tom Lane wrote:
> Clodoaldo <clodoaldo(dot)pinto(dot)neto(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> > 2008/1/16, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us>:
> >> I don't know of any reason to think that insertion is slower in 8.3
> >> than it was in 8.2, and no one else has reported anything of the sort.
>
> > The old server reproduces the behavior of the new one.
>
> Okay, Clodoaldo kindly gave me access to his old server, and after
> nearly a full day of poking at it I think I've figured out what is going
> on. Recall that the problem query is
>
> insert into usuarios (
> data,
> usuario,
> pontos,
> wus
> )
> select
> (select data_serial from data_serial) as data,
> ui.usuario_serial as usuario,
> sum(pontos) as pontos,
> sum(wus) as wus
> from usuarios_temp as ut inner join usuarios_indice as ui
> on ut.usuario = ui.usuario_nome and ut.n_time = ui.n_time
> group by data, ui.usuario_serial
> ;
>
> for which both 8.2 and 8.3 select a plan along the lines of
>
> Subquery Scan "*SELECT*" (cost=318139.26..342283.02 rows=877955 width=20)
> -> HashAggregate (cost=318139.26..331308.58 rows=877955 width=12)
> InitPlan
> -> Seq Scan on data_serial (cost=0.00..1.01 rows=1 width=4)
> -> Merge Join (cost=101944.33..261142.53 rows=5699572 width=12)
> Merge Cond: ((ut.n_time = ui.n_time) AND ((ut.usuario)::text = "inner"."?column4?"))
> -> Index Scan using usuarios_temp_ndx on usuarios_temp ut (cost=0.00..55038.92 rows=883729 width=26)
> -> Sort (cost=101944.33..104139.22 rows=877955 width=22)
> Sort Key: ui.n_time, (ui.usuario_nome)::text
> -> Seq Scan on usuarios_indice ui (cost=0.00..15273.55 rows=877955 width=22)
>
> and the target table has non-unique indexes on "data" and "usuario"
> (which are both simple integer columns, no surprises there).
>
> I first tried running this query with "usuarios" initially empty, and
> both 8.2 and 8.3 did fine. However, in the real scenario that Clodoaldo
> is worried about, there's somewhere north of 135 million entries in
> "usuarios" to begin with, and in that case 8.3 falls off a cliff while
> 8.2 doesn't --- the INSERT query takes about 400 seconds in 8.2 while
> I gave up at 2h20m with 8.3. Why is that? Well, it turns out that 8.3
> is thrashing a lot harder than 8.2 is. Each index on "usuarios" is
> about 2.3GB (the same in both versions) and the server has only 2GB RAM,
> so it's not real surprising that the working set might be more than RAM;
> but why is 8.3 worse than 8.2?
>
> You can see from the query that it's inserting the same constant "data"
> value into every new row, and if I understand the context correctly this
> value will be higher than all prior entries in the "usuarios" table. So
> all the new entries in the "data" index are at the right-hand edge of
> the index, and only a fairly small footprint is being touched at any
> instant. strace'ing confirms that neither 8.2 nor 8.3 do much I/O at
> all on that index. It's the index on the "usuario" column that is
> thrashing.
>
> The difference comes from the fact that the HashAggregate step --- which
> is being done on hashing columns (data, usuario) --- is effectively
> reading out in hash-value order for usuario, meaning that that is the
> order in which we make index insertions. 8.2 had an extremely chintzy
> hash function for integers --- basically just return the negative of the
> integer value --- while 8.3 takes it seriously and produces a nicely
> randomized hash value. This means that the usuario values are returned
> in a relatively well ordered fashion in 8.2 and a nearly totally random
> one in 8.3. I captured the output of the SELECT in both 8.2 and 8.3;
> attached are plots showing the usuario values against row number. From
> this we can see that 8.2 has a working set that is a relatively small
> part of the index at any instant, whereas 8.3 has the entire index as
> working set ... and it doesn't fit into RAM. Ergo, lots of disk seek
> delays.
>
> I don't think we want to back off the improved hashing functions in 8.3
> --- in most scenarios they should lead to significantly better
> performance. But in this particular context they hurt.
>
> A possibly usable workaround for now is "set enable_hashagg = off"
> to force a GroupAggregate plan, which will deliver the values sorted
> by (data, usuario) rather than by their hash values. This helps both
> versions, bringing the runtime down to something like 250 seconds,
> because the index on usuario then has complete locality of access.
> Alternatively, doubling the server's RAM would probably make the problem
> go away (for awhile, until the index reaches 4GB).
>
> In the long run, for queries inserting many rows it might be interesting
> to accumulate all the entries intended for a btree index and sort them
> before inserting. Not sure about possible downsides of that.
>
> regards, tom lane
>

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