Re: BitmapHeapScan streaming read user and prelim refactoring

On 2/10/25 19:02, Melanie Plageman wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 9, 2025 at 9:27 AM Tomas Vondra <tomas(at)vondra(dot)me> wrote:
>>
>>
>> 2) ryzen
>> --------
>>
>> This "new" machine has multiple types of storage. The cached results (be
>> it in shared buffers or in page cache) are not very interesting. 0003
>> helps a bit (~15%), but other than that it's just random noise.
>>
>> The "uncached" results starting on page 23 are much more interesting. In
>> general 0001, 0002 and 0004 have little impact, it seems just random
>> noise. So in the rest I'll focus on 0003.
>>
>> For the single nvme device (device: data), it seems mostly fine. It's
>> green, even though there are a couple "localized regressions" for eic=0.
>> I haven't looked into those yet.
>>
>> For the nvme RAID (device: raid-nvme), it's looks almost exactly the
>> same, except that with parallel query (page 27) there's a clear area of
>> regression with eic=1 (look for "column" of red cells). That's a bit
>> unfortunate, because eic=1 is the default value.
>
> It'll be hard to look into all of these, so I think I'll focus on
> trying to reproduce something with eic=1 that I can reproduce on my
> machine. So far, I can reproduce a regression with the following and
> the data file attached.
>

Yes, that approach makes perfect sense. I don't think anyone can
investigate all the regressions, it's enough to investigate one specimen
for each of the main "patterns".

> # initdb and get set up with shared_buffers 1GB
> psql -c "create table bitmap_scan_test (a bigint, b bigint, c text)
> with (fillfactor = 25)"
> psql -c "copy bitmap_scan_test from '/tmp/bitmap_scan_test.data'"
> psql -c "create index on bitmap_scan_test (a)"
> psql -c "vacuum analyze"
> psql -c "checkpoint"
>
> pg_ctl stop
> echo 3 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
> pg_ctl start
> psql -c "SET max_parallel_workers_per_gather = 4;" \
> -c "SET effective_io_concurrency = 1;" \
> -c "SET parallel_setup_cost = 0;" \
> -c "SET parallel_tuple_cost = 0;" \
> -c "SET enable_seqscan = off;" \
> -c "SET enable_indexscan = off;" \
> -c "SET work_mem = 65536;"
>
> psql -c "EXPLAIN SELECT * FROM bitmap_scan_test WHERE (a BETWEEN -33
> AND 10015) OFFSET 1000000;"
> psql -c "SELECT * FROM bitmap_scan_test WHERE (a BETWEEN -33 AND
> 10015) OFFSET 1000000;"
>
> It's not a huge regression and planner doesn't naturally pick parallel
> bitmap heap scan for this, but I don't have a SATA drive right now, so
> I focused on something I could reproduce.
>
> One thing I noticed when I was playing around with the script is that
> depending on the values chosen by random(), there were differences in
> timing. From your script, it looks like the $from and $to won't be the
> same for master and the patch each time (they are set in the inner
> most nesting level, below where $build is set). Am I understanding
> correctly?
>

Yes. The values for the WHERE conditions are generated randomly, and the
idea is that it evens out for multiple runs. Maybe not with only 3 runs
per query, but it should be good enough to show patterns (e.g. when the
runs with eic=1 show regression).

>> Anyway, the results look sensible. It might be good to investigate some
>> of the regressions, and I'll try doing that if I find the time. But I
>> don't think that's necessarily a blocker - every patch of this type will
>> have a hardware where the heuristics doesn't quite do the right thing by
>> default. Which is why we have GUCs to tune it if appropriate.
>
> Yea, I definitely won't be able to look into all of the regressions.
> So, I guess we have to ask if we are willing to make the tradeoff.
>

I'm at peace with that.

Certainly for the "localized" regressions, and cases when bitmapheapscan
would not be picked. The eic=1 case makes me a bit more nervous, because
it's default and affects NVMe storage. Would be good to know why is
that, or perhaps consider bumping up eic default. Not sure.

regards

--
Tomas Vondra