Re: plpgsql function startup-time improvements

Hello Tom,

On Wed, December 27, 2017 3:38 pm, Tom Lane wrote:
> Attached are patches for two performance-improvement ideas that came
> to me while working on
[snip]
>
> Also, I changed PLpgSQL_var.isconst and PLpgSQL_var.notnull from "int"
> to "bool", which is what they should have been all along, and relocated
> them in the PLpgSQL_var struct. There are two motivations for this.
> It saves a whole 8 bytes per PLpgSQL_var, at least on 64-bit machines,
> because the fields now fit into what had been wasted padding space;
> reducing the size of what we have to copy during copy_plpgsql_datums
> has to be worth something. Second, those fields are now adjacent to
> the common PLpgSQL_variable fields, which will simplify migrating them
> into PLpgSQL_variable, as I anticipate we'll want to do at some point
> when we allow composite variables to be marked CONSTANT and maybe NOT
> NULL.

More performance, especially in plpgsql is always a good thing :)

After a few experiments I've got a question or two, though (and please
excuse if this are stupid questions :)

My C is a bit rusty, so I embarked on a mission to learn more.

With a short test program printing out the size of PLpgSQL_var to check, I
always saw 72 bytes, regardless of bool vs. int. So a bool would be 4
bytes here. Hmm.

Googling around, this patch comment from Peter Eisentraut says that "bool"
can be more than one byte, and only "bool8" is really one byte.

https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/attachment/54267/0006-Add-bool8-typedef-for-system-catalog-structs.patch

I used 64-bit Kubuntu, the gcc that came with the system, and installed
Postgres 10 to see what MAXIMUM_ALIGNOF should be (it says 8 here).

Since I could get the test program to compile against all PG header files
(which is probably me being just being dense...), I used a stripped down
test.c (attached).

However, I probably did not have the real compiler settings, which might
influence the size of bool or the enum definition?

Maybe someone could shed some light on these questions:

* Does bool vs. int really save space or is this maybe system/compiler
dependend?

* Or should the structs use "bool8" to ensure this?

* I dimly remember that access to 1-byte fields might be slower than to 4
byte fields on X86-64. Would the size savings still worth it?

And maybe folding all four bool fields into an "int flags" field with bits
would save space, and not much slower (depending on often how the
different flags are accessed due to the ANDing and ORing ops)?

Best regards,

Tels