hash_search_with_hash_value is high in "perf top" on a replica

From: Dmitry Koterov <dmitry(dot)koterov(at)gmail(dot)com>
To: "pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org" <pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org>
Subject: hash_search_with_hash_value is high in "perf top" on a replica
Date: 2025-01-31 11:30:35
Message-ID: CA+CZih5R_ZMjcuMHM3Ub10vTNDLEBjW8VsO3h-y2WKb=oK4fWw@mail.gmail.com
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Hi.

Debugging some replication lag on a replica when the master node
experiences heavy writes.

PG "startup recovering" eats up a lot of CPU (like 65 %user and 30 %sys),
which is a little surprising (what is it doing with all those CPU cycles?
it looked like WAL replay should be more IO bound than CPU bound?).

Running "perf top -p <pid>", it shows this:

Samples: 1M of event 'cycles:P', 4000 Hz, Event count (approx.):
18178814660 lost: 0/0 drop: 0/0
Overhead Shared Object Symbol
16.63% postgres [.] hash_search_with_hash_value
5.38% postgres [.] __aarch64_ldset4_sync
4.42% postgres [.] __aarch64_cas4_acq_rel
3.42% postgres [.] XLogReadBufferExtended
2.35% libc.so.6 [.] 0x0000000000097f4c
2.04% postgres [.] pg_comp_crc32c_armv8
1.77% [kernel] [k] mutex_lock
1.63% postgres [.] XLogPrefetcherReadRecord
1.56% postgres [.] DecodeXLogRecord
1.55% postgres [.] LWLockAcquire

This is more surprising: hash_search_with_hash_value is a hash table lookup
function, is it expected that it is #1 in the profiler? (Called mostly from
PrefetchSharedBuffer*.)

Configuration:
- PG17
- ZFS, compression is off, empty database (with compression on, most of
"startup recovering" CPU was spent in ZFS guts doing
compression/decompression according to the profiler)
- full_page_writes=off, recovery_prefetch=on (ZFS supports it, I tested
with a small C program), wal_decode_buffer_size=2048kB (it doesn't seem to
affect anything though).
- shared_buffers = 25% of RAM
- testing with a giant COPY command basically

My main question is about hash_search_with_hash_value
<https://github.com/postgres/postgres/blob/59d6c03956193f622c069a4ab985bade27384ac4/src/backend/utils/hash/dynahash.c#L968>
CPU usage. With both recovery_prefetch=on and off, it is the topmost
function in "perf top". I see no IO bottleneck on the machine, it's only
"startup recovering" maxing out one CPU core.

Maybe it's a red herring though, but it looks pretty suspicious.

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