Re: generic plans and "initial" pruning

On Tue, Mar 15, 2022 at 5:06 AM Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 14, 2022 at 3:38 PM Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> > What I am skeptical about is that this work actually accomplishes
> > anything under real-world conditions. That's because if pruning would
> > save enough to make skipping the lock-acquisition phase worth the
> > trouble, the plan cache is almost certainly going to decide it should
> > be using a custom plan not a generic plan. Now if we had a better
> > cost model (or, indeed, any model at all) for run-time pruning effects
> > then maybe that situation could be improved. I think we'd be better
> > served to worry about that end of it before we spend more time making
> > the executor even less predictable.
>
> I don't agree with that analysis, because setting plan_cache_mode is
> not uncommon. Even if that GUC didn't exist, I'm pretty sure there are
> cases where the planner naturally falls into a generic plan anyway,
> even though pruning is happening. But as it is, the GUC does exist,
> and people use it. Consequently, while I'd love to see something done
> about the costing side of things, I do not accept that all other
> improvements should wait for that to happen.

I agree that making generic plans execute faster has merit even before
we make the costing changes to allow plancache.c prefer generic plans
over custom ones in these cases. As the numbers in my previous email
show, simply executing a generic plan with the proposed improvements
applied is significantly cheaper than having the planner do the
pruning on every execution:

nparts auto/custom generic
====== ========== ======
32 13359 28204
64 15760 26795
128 15825 26387
256 15017 25601
512 13479 19911
1024 13200 20158
2048 12884 16180

> > Also, while I've not spent much time at all reading this patch,
> > it seems rather desperately undercommented, and a lot of the
> > new names are unintelligible. In particular, I suspect that the
> > patch is significantly redesigning when/where run-time pruning
> > happens (unless it's just letting that be run twice); but I don't
> > see any documentation or name changes suggesting where that
> > responsibility is now.
>
> I am sympathetic to that concern. I spent a while staring at a
> baffling comment in 0001 only to discover it had just been moved from
> elsewhere. I really don't feel that things in this are as clear as
> they could be -- although I hasten to add that I respect the people
> who have done work in this area previously and am grateful for what
> they did. It's been a huge benefit to the project in spite of the
> bumps in the road. Moreover, this isn't the only code in PostgreSQL
> that needs improvement, or the worst. That said, I do think there are
> problems. I don't yet have a position on whether this patch is making
> that better or worse.

Okay, I'd like to post a new version with the comments edited to make
them a bit more intelligible. I understand that the comments around
the new invocation mode(s) of runtime pruning are not as clear as they
should be, especially as the changes that this patch wants to make to
how things work are not very localized.

> That said, I believe that the core idea of the patch is to optionally
> perform pruning before we acquire locks or spin up the main executor
> and then remember the decisions we made. If once the main executor is
> spun up we already made those decisions, then we must stick with what
> we decided. If not, we make those pruning decisions at the same point
> we do currently

Right. The "initial" pruning, that this patch wants to make occur at
an earlier point (plancache.c), is currently performed in
ExecInit[Merge]Append().

If it does occur early due to the plan being a cached one,
ExecInit[Merge]Append() simply refers to its result that would be made
available via a new data structure that plancache.c has been made to
pass down to the executor alongside the plan tree.

If it does not, ExecInit[Merge]Append() does the pruning in the same
way it does now. Such cases include initial pruning using only STABLE
expressions that the planner doesn't bother to compute by itself lest
the resulting plan may be cached, but no EXTERN parameters.

--
Amit Langote
EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com