Re: Flushing large data immediately in pqcomm

On Mon, Jan 29, 2024 at 11:12 AM Heikki Linnakangas <hlinnaka(at)iki(dot)fi> wrote:
> Agreed, that's silly.

+1.

> If there's already some data in PqSendBuffer, I wonder if it would be
> better to fill it up with data, flush it, and then send the rest of the
> data directly. Instead of flushing the partial data first. I'm afraid
> that you'll make a tiny call to secure_write(), followed by a large one,
> then a tine one again, and so forth. Especially when socket_putmessage
> itself writes the msgtype and len, which are tiny, before the payload.
>
> Perhaps we should invent a new pq_putmessage() function that would take
> an input buffer with 5 bytes of space reserved before the payload.
> pq_putmessage() could then fill in the msgtype and len bytes in the
> input buffer and send that directly. (Not wedded to that particular API,
> but something that would have the same effect)

I share the concern; I'm not sure about the best solution. I wonder if
it would be useful to have pq_putmessagev() in the style of writev()
et al. Or maybe what we need is secure_writev().

I also wonder if the threshold for sending data directly should be
smaller than the buffer size, and/or whether it should depend on the
buffer being empty. If we have an 8kB buffer that currently has
nothing in it, and somebody writes 2kB, I suspect it might be wrong to
copy that into the buffer. If the same buffer had 5kB used and 3kB
free, copying sounds a lot more likely to work out. The goal here is
probably to condense sequences of short messages into a single
transmission while sending long messages individually. I'm just not
quite sure what heuristic would do that most effectively.

--
Robert Haas
EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com