Re: TRACE_SORT defined by default

On Wed, Apr 24, 2019 at 06:04:41PM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
>Peter Geoghegan <pg(at)bowt(dot)ie> writes:
>> On Wed, Apr 24, 2019 at 2:15 PM Joe Conway <mail(at)joeconway(dot)com> wrote:
>>> Has anyone ever (or recently) measured the impact on performance to have
>>> this enabled? Is it that generically useful for debugging of production
>>> instances of Postgres that we really want it always enabled despite the
>>> performance impact?
>
>> It is disabled by default, in the sense that the trace_sort GUC
>> defaults to off. I believe that the overhead of building in the
>> instrumentation without enabling it is indistinguishable from zero.
>
>It would probably be useful to actually prove that rather than just
>assuming it. I do see some code under the symbol that is executed
>even when !trace_sort, and in any case Andres keeps complaining that
>even always-taken branches are expensive ...
>

Did I hear the magical word "benchmark" over here?

I suppose it'd be useful to have some actual numbers showing what
overhead this actually has, and whether disabling it would make any
difference. I can't run anything right away, but I could get us some
numbers in a couple of days, assuming there is some agreement on which
cases we need to test.

regards

--
Tomas Vondra http://www.2ndQuadrant.com
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