Re: More speedups for tuple deformation

> On Jan 20, 2026, at 12:32, Chao Li <li(dot)evan(dot)chao(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>
>
>
>> On Jan 20, 2026, at 08:11, David Rowley <dgrowleyml(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, 19 Jan 2026 at 18:48, Chao Li <li(dot)evan(dot)chao(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>>> I reviewed the patch and traced some basic workflows. But I haven’t done a load test to compare performance differences with and without this patch, I will do that if I get some bandwidth later. Here comes some review comments:
>>>
>>> 1 - tupmacs.h
>>> ```
>>> + /* Create a mask with all bits beyond natts's bit set to off */
>>> + mask = 0xFF & ((((uint8) 1) << (natts & 7)) - 1);
>>> + byte = (~bits[lastByte]) & mask;
>>> ```
>>>
>>> When I read the code, I got an impression bits[lastByte] might overflow when natts % 8 == 0, so I traced the code, then I realized that, this function is only called when a row has null values, so that, when reaching here, natts % 8 != 0, otherwise it should return earlier within the for loop.
>>
>> It certainly is possible to get to that part of the code when natts is
>> a multiple of 8 and the tuple contains NULLs after that (we may not be
>> deforming the entire tuple). The code you quoted that's setting "mask"
>> in that case will produce a zero mask, resulting in not finding any
>> NULLs. I don't quite see any risk of overflowing any of the types
>> here. If natts is 16 then effectively the code does 0xFF & ((1 << 0)
>> - 1); so no overflow. Just left shift by 0 bits and bitwise AND with
>> zero, resulting in the mask becoming zero.
>>
>> How about if I write the comment as follows?
>>
>> /*
>> * Create a mask with all bits beyond natts's bit set to off. The code
>> * below will generate a zero mask when natts & 7 == 0. When that happens
>> * all bytes that need to be checked were done so in the loop above. The
>> * code below will create an empty mask and end up returning natts. This
>> * has been done to avoid having to write a special case to check if we've
>> * covered all bytes already.
>> */
>>
>
> I’m sorry I didn’t express myself clearly, maybe I should have used “OOB” rather than “overflow". My real concern is about out-of-boundary read of bits[lastByte] when natts&7==0.
>
> Say, natts is 16, then bits is 2 bytes long; lastByte = 16>>3 = 2, so bits[2] is a OOB read.
>
> If first_null_attr() is only called when hasnulls==true, then it will never hit the OOB point, because it will return early from the “for” loop. In the current patch, which is true, so the OOB should never happen.
>
> However, I don’t see any comment mentions something like “first_null_attr() should only be called when hasnulls is true. If in future one calls first_null_attr() in a situation where hasnulls == false, then the OOB will be triggered.
>
> The comment you added explains that even if OOB happens, no matter what value is hold by bits[lastByte], because mask is 0, the final result is still correct, which is true, but OOB is still a concern. If the bits array happens to end exactly at the edge of a memory page, the OOB read bits[lastByte] may trigger a segment fault; and valgrind may detect the OOB and complain about it.
>
> So, my original comment was that, we should at least add something to the header comment to mention “first_null_attr() should only be called when hasnulls is true. If we can add an Assert to ensure hasnulls is true, that would be even better.
>
> But if we want first_null_attr() to be safe no matter hasnulls is true or false, I think we should avoid the OOB.
>

I also noticed one thing that, with running an arbitrary SQL statement, first_null_attr() might be called with natts=0, so maybe it can have a fast path to return 0 directly if natts==0.

Best regards,
--
Chao Li (Evan)
HighGo Software Co., Ltd.
https://www.highgo.com/