Re: SeqScan costs

On Aug 13, 2008, at 3:52 PM, Decibel! wrote:
>> The problem is that by looking for a constant row, you're actually
>> eliminating the entire effect being tested, because the uncorrelated
>> subselect is run ONCE as an initplan, and the entire query time is
>> then spent elsewhere. The differences in runtime you're seeing are
>> pure noise (the fact that you had to increase the iteration count so
>> much should have been a clue here).
>
> Makes sense, and yeah, I was wondering a bit about that. I'll try to
> fake it out with offset 0 later on if no one beats me to it; I do
> still
> think we could just be seeing the effect of slogging through 200
> tuples
> instead of going directly to the one we want.

OK, ran the test again via this query:

explain analyze select (select value from oneblock where id = i) from
generate_series(1,1) i, generate_series(1,100000) j;

changing 1,1 to 200,200 as needed. I don't see any meaningful
differences between 1,1 and 200,200. The seqscan case is still
notably slower than the index case (~5500ms vs ~800ms).

It'd be useful to get strace data on this, but OS X doesn't have
that :/ (and I'm on 10.4 so no dtrace either). Can someone get an
strace from this?
--
Decibel!, aka Jim C. Nasby, Database Architect decibel(at)decibel(dot)org
Give your computer some brain candy! www.distributed.net Team #1828