Re: POC: converting Lists into arrays

Andrew Gierth <andrew(at)tao11(dot)riddles(dot)org(dot)uk> writes:
> To get a reliable measurement of timing changes less than around 3%,
> what you have to do is this: pick some irrelevant function and add
> something like an asm directive that inserts a variable number of NOPs,
> and do a series of test runs with different values.

Good point. If you're looking at a microbenchmark that only exercises
a small amount of code, it can be way worse than that. I was reminded
of this the other day while fooling with the problem discussed in
https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/6970(dot)1545327857(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us
in which we were spending huge amounts of time in a tight loop in
match_eclasses_to_foreign_key_col. I normally run with --enable-cassert
unless I'm trying to collect performance data; so I rebuilt with
--disable-cassert, and was bemused to find out that that test case ran
circa 20% *slower* in the non-debug build. This is silly on its face,
and even more so when you notice that match_eclasses_to_foreign_key_col
itself contains no Asserts and so its machine code is unchanged by the
switch. (I went to the extent of comparing .s files to verify this.)
So that had to have been down to alignment/cacheline issues triggered
by moving said function around. I doubt the case would be exactly
reproducible on different hardware or toolchain, but another platform
would likely show similar issues on some case or other.

tl;dr: even a 20% difference might be nothing more than an artifact.

regards, tom lane