Re: Reduce timing overhead of EXPLAIN ANALYZE using rdtsc?

Hi,

On 2023-01-02 14:28:20 +0100, David Geier wrote:
> I also somewhat improved the accuracy of the cycles to milli- and
> microseconds conversion functions by having two more multipliers with higher
> precision. For microseconds we could also keep the computation integer-only.
> I'm wondering what to best do for seconds and milliseconds. I'm currently
> leaning towards just keeping it as is, because the durations measured and
> converted are usually long enough that precision shouldn't be a problem.

I'm doubtful this is worth the complexity it incurs. By the time we convert
out of the instr_time format, the times shouldn't be small enough that the
accuracy is affected much.

Looking around, most of the existing uses of INSTR_TIME_GET_MICROSEC()
actually accumulate themselves, and should instead keep things in the
instr_time format and convert later. We'd win more accuracy / speed that way.

I don't think the introduction of pg_time_usec_t was a great idea, but oh
well.

> Additionally, I initialized a few variables of type instr_time which
> otherwise resulted in warnings due to use of potentially uninitialized
> variables.

Unless we decide, as I suggested downthread, that we deprecate
INSTR_TIME_SET_ZERO(), that's unfortunately not the right fix. I've a similar
patch that adds all the necesarry INSTR_TIME_SET_ZERO() calls.

> What about renaming INSTR_TIME_GET_DOUBLE() to INSTR_TIME_GET_SECS() so that
> it's consistent with the _MILLISEC() and _MICROSEC() variants?

> The INSTR_TIME_GET_MICROSEC() returns a uint64 while the other variants
> return double. This seems error prone. What about renaming the function or
> also have the function return a double and cast where necessary at the call
> site?

I think those should be a separate discussion / patch.

Greetings,

Andres Freund