Re: Large number of partitions of a table

On 1/18/22 2:19 AM, Victor Sudakov wrote:
> Tom Lane wrote:
>> Victor Sudakov <vas(at)sibptus(dot)ru> writes:
>>> Tom Lane wrote:
>>>> Well, yeah, actually. An ill-advised query will blow out your backend's
>>>> memory consumption, potentially leading to a SIGKILL from the dreaded OOM
>>>> killer[1] (if you're on Linux), resulting in a backend crash and cluster
>>>> restart.
>>> Why should "SELECT COUNT(*) FROM t" ever consume more than work_mem
>>> even if t has 10000 partitions?
>> Sure, COUNT(*)'s runtime memory consumption is negligible.
>> But you're not thinking about overhead --- specifically,
>>
>> 1. 10000 relcache entries for the base tables.
>>
>> 2. If you have N indexes per table, N*10000 relcache entries for
>> the indexes. (The planner will probably have looked at all those
>> indexes, even if it didn't find any use for them.)
>>
>> 3. 10000 SeqScan plan nodes and associated rangetable entries,
>>
>> 4. Likewise, 10000 instances of executor per-node state.
>>
>> 5. 10000 lock table entries (both shared and local lock tables).
>>
>> 6. Probably a few per-relation things I didn't think of.
> I see your point about all that query-related stuff. I hope the
> testing of queries in a staging environment should help to detect such
> situations.
>
> What about the system catalogs however? Will the extra 10000
> tables and 500000 indexes negatively impact the performance of the
> system catalogs? Are there any caveats you could think of?

EXPLAIN plans are going to be hilariously gigantic, which means that query
planning would take a loooong time,  And the query planner (in v12, at
least) can generate some pretty bad plans in partitioned tables; I bet there
are edge cases in the QP code that don't work well with 10000 partitions and
50000 indices.

--
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