Re: bytea memory improvement

On Wed, 23 Aug 2006, Luis Vilar Flores wrote:

> To all that already forgot the first emails, I developed an modified
> version of the method toBytes from the org.postgresql.util.PGbytea
> class. The old method uses 3 buffers to translate the data from the
> nework to the client, this uses too much memory. My method only uses 2
> buffers, but does one more pass through the original buffer (to
> calculate it's final size).
>

I'm not super impressed with these timing results. They are certainly
showing some effects due to GC, consider the rise in time here at 10.5MB.

> OLD method:
> size: 9.5MB execute+next: 804ms getBytes: 377ms used mem: 66169KB
> size: 10.5MB execute+next: 634ms getBytes: 546ms used mem: 73112KB
> size: 11.5MB execute+next: 689ms getBytes: 450ms used mem: 80057KB
> size: 12.5MB execute+next: 748ms getBytes: 482ms used mem: 87001KB

I came up with my own contrived benchmark (attached) that attempts to
focus solely on the getBytes() call and avoid the time of fetching
results, but it doesn't give really consistent results and I haven't been
able to come up with a case that actually shows the new method was faster
even with 30MB of data. This is on Debian Linux / 2xOpteron 246 / jdk
1.5.0-05.

I've committed this to CVS HEAD with a rather arbitrarily set
MAX_3_BUFF_SIZE value of 2MB. Note that this is also the escaped size, so
we may actually be dealing with output data a quarter of that size. If
anyone could do some more testing of what a good crossover point would be
that would be a good thing.

Thanks for your patience with this item.

Kris Jurka