Re: index prefetching

On 8/11/25 22:14, Peter Geoghegan wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 11, 2025 at 10:16 AM Tomas Vondra <tomas(at)vondra(dot)me> wrote:
>> Perhaps. For me benchmarks are a way to learn about stuff and better
>> understand the pros/cons of approaches. It's possible some of the
>> changes will impact the characteristics, but I doubt it can change the
>> fundamental differences due to the simple approach being limited to a
>> single leaf page, etc.
>
> I think that we're all now agreed that we want to take the complex
> patch's approach. ISTM that that development makes comparative
> benchmarking much less interesting, at least for the time being. IMV
> we should focus on cleaning up the complex patch, and on closing out
> at least a few open items.
>

I agree comparing "simple" and "complex" patches is less interesting. I
still plan to keep comparing "master" and "complex", mostly to look for
unexpected regressions etc.

> The main thing that I'm personally interested in right now,
> benchmark-wise, is cases where the complex patch doesn't perform as
> well as expected when we compare (say) backwards scans to forwards
> scans with the complex patch. In other words, I'm mostly interested in
> getting an overall sense of the performance profile of the complex
> patch -- which has nothing to do with how it performs against the
> master branch. I'd like to find and debug any weird performance
> bugs/strange discontinuities in performance. I have a feeling that
> there are at least a couple of those lurking in the complex patch
> right now. Once we have some confidence that the overall performance
> profile of the complex patch "makes sense", we can do more invasive
> refactoring (while systematically avoiding new regressions for the
> cases that were fixed).
>

I can do some tests with forward vs. backwards scans. Of course, the
trouble with finding these weird cases is that they may be fairly rare.
So hitting them is a matter or luck or just happening to generate the
right data / query. But I'll give it a try and we'll see.

> In summary, I think that we should focus on fixing smaller open items
> for now -- with an emphasis on fixing strange inconsistencies in
> performance for distinct-though-similar queries (pairs of queries that
> intuitively seem like they should perform very similarly, but somehow
> have very different performance). I can't really justify that, but my
> gut feeling is that that's the best place to focus our efforts for the
> time being.
>

OK

--
Tomas Vondra