Re: Double sorting split patch

On 15 September 2011 19:46, Alexander Korotkov <aekorotkov(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> Proposed algorithm finds following splits by single pass on two arrays: one
> sorted by lower bound of interval and another sorted by upper bound of
> interval.

Have you considered if further performance improvements could come
from providing a qsort implementation that allows for the inlining of
the comparator? I find it curious that we go to the trouble of
providing a custom qsort implementation in qsort.c, pg_qsort, but
haven't gone one step further and considered inlining effects. Here's
a macro-based inlining implementation:

http://www.corpit.ru/mjt/qsort.html

I wondered in passing if compiler vendors had got around to figuring
out a way of solving the "inlining function pointer" problem that I
first read about years ago, so I ran this code, which benchmarks the
macro-based qsort above:

http://www.lemoda.net/c/inline-qsort-example/index.html

It's actually C++, but that isn't significant (c stdlib qsort() is
called). When I built this code with GCC 4.5, the results were:

C quick-sort time elapsed: 3.24
Inline C quick-sort time elapsed: 2.01

It looks like this is something that could be revisited.

--
Peter Geoghegan       http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
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