Greg Smith wrote:
On Thu, 17 Sep 2009, Dan Colish wrote:

- Performance appears to be the same although I don't have a good way for
      testing this at the moment

Here's what I do to generate simple COPY performance test cases:

CREATE TABLE t (i integer);
INSERT INTO t SELECT x FROM generate_series(1,100000) AS x;
\timing
COPY t TO '/some/file' WITH [options];
BEGIN;
TRUNCATE TABLE t;
COPY t FROM '/some/file' WITH [options];
COMMIT;

You can adjust the size of the generated table based on whether you want to minimize (small number) or maximize (big number) the impact of the setup overhead relative to actual processing time. Big numbers make sense if there's a per-row change, small ones if it's mainly COPY setup that's been changed if you want a small bit of data to test against.

An example with one column in it is a good test case for seeing whether per-row impact has gone up. You'd want something with a wider row for other types of performance tests.

The reason for the BEGIN/COMMIT there is that form utilizes an optimization that lowers WAL volume when doing the COPY insertion, which makes it more likely you'll be testing performance of the right thing.



I usually prefer to test with a table that is more varied than anything you can make with generate_series. When I tested my ragged copy patch the other day I copied 1,000,000 rows out of a large table with a mixture of dates, strings, numbers and nulls.

But then, it has a (tiny) per field overhead so I wanted to make sure that was well represented in the test.

You are certainly right about wrapping it in begin/truncate/commit (and when you do make sure that archiving is not on).

You probably want to make sure that the file is not on the same disk as the database, to avoid disk contention. Or, better, make sure that it is in OS file system cache, or on a RAM disk.

cheers

andrew

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