Thanks for investigating this and finding the guilty commit. On Thu, 29 Sept 2022 at 07:34, Tom Lane <t...@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote: > After looking at that for a little while, I wonder if we shouldn't > fix this by restricting the Datum-sort path to be used only with > pass-by-value data types. That'd require only a minor addition > to the new logic in ExecInitSort.
I'm also wondering if that's the best fix given the timing of this discovery. > The alternative of inserting a pfree of the old value would complicate > the code nontrivially, I think, and really it would necessitate a > complete performance re-test. I'm wondering if the claimed speedup > for pass-by-ref types wasn't fictional and based on skipping the > required pfrees. Besides, if you think this code is hot enough that > you don't want to add a test-and-branch per tuple (a claim I also > doubt, BTW) then you probably don't want to add such overhead into > the pass-by-value case where the speedup is clear. I'm wondering if the best way to fix it if doing it that way would be to invent tuplesort_getdatum_nocopy() which would be the same as tuplesort_getdatum() except it wouldn't do the datumCopy for byref types. It looks like tuplesort_gettupleslot() when copy==false just directly stores the MinimalTuple that's in stup.tuple and shouldFree is set to false. Going by [1], it looks like I saw gains in test 6, which was a byref Datum. Skipping the datumCopy() I imagine could only make the gains slightly higher on that. That puts me a bit more on the fence about the best fix for PG15. I've attached a patch to restrict the optimisation to byval types in the meantime. David [1] https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CAApHDvrWV%3Dv0qKsC9_BHqhCn9TusrNvCaZDz77StCO--fmgbKA%40mail.gmail.com
diff --git a/src/backend/executor/nodeSort.c b/src/backend/executor/nodeSort.c index 3c28d60c3e..740ad37717 100644 --- a/src/backend/executor/nodeSort.c +++ b/src/backend/executor/nodeSort.c @@ -220,6 +220,7 @@ SortState * ExecInitSort(Sort *node, EState *estate, int eflags) { SortState *sortstate; + TupleDesc outerTupDesc; SO1_printf("ExecInitSort: %s\n", "initializing sort node"); @@ -274,11 +275,13 @@ ExecInitSort(Sort *node, EState *estate, int eflags) ExecInitResultTupleSlotTL(&sortstate->ss.ps, &TTSOpsMinimalTuple); sortstate->ss.ps.ps_ProjInfo = NULL; + outerTupDesc = ExecGetResultType(outerPlanState(sortstate)); + /* - * We perform a Datum sort when we're sorting just a single column, + * We perform a Datum sort when we're sorting just a single byval column, * otherwise we perform a tuple sort. */ - if (ExecGetResultType(outerPlanState(sortstate))->natts == 1) + if (outerTupDesc->natts == 1 && outerTupDesc->attrs[0].attbyval) sortstate->datumSort = true; else sortstate->datumSort = false;