Re: [HACKERS] Polyphase merge is obsolete

[Tomas Vondra]

Hi,

I planned to do some benchmarking on this patch, but apparently the
patch no longer applies. Rebase please?

regards

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Re: [HACKERS] Polyphase merge is obsolete

[Peter Geoghegan]

On Wed, Aug 30, 2017 at 12:48 PM, Robert Haas  wrote:
> These are separate topics.  They should each be discussed on their own
> thread.  Please don't hijack this thread to talk about something else.

I don't think that that is a fair summary.

Heikki has done a number of things in this area, of which this is only
the latest. I'm saying "hey, have you thought about RS too?". Whether
or not I'm "hijacking" this thread is, at best, ambiguous.

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Re: [HACKERS] Polyphase merge is obsolete

[Robert Haas]

On Wed, Aug 30, 2017 at 2:54 PM, Peter Geoghegan  wrote:
> I noticed that this is in the upcoming CF 1 for v11. I'm signed up to review.
>
> I'd like to point out that replacement selection is also obsolete,
> which is something I brought up recently [1]. I don't actually have
> any feature-driven reason to want to kill replacement selection - it's
> just an annoyance at this point. I do think that RS is more deserving
> of being killed than Polyphase merge, because it actually costs users
> something to continue to support it. The replacement_sort_tuples GUC
> particularly deserves to be removed.
>
> It would be nice if killing RS was put in scope here. I'd appreciate
> it, at least, since it would simplify the heap routines noticeably.
> The original analysis that led to adding replacement_sort_tuples was
> based on certain performance characteristics of merging that have
> since changed by quite a bit, due to our work for v10.

These are separate topics.  They should each be discussed on their own
thread.  Please don't hijack this thread to talk about something else.

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Robert Haas
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Re: [HACKERS] Polyphase merge is obsolete

[Peter Geoghegan]

On Mon, Feb 27, 2017 at 2:45 PM, Peter Geoghegan  wrote:
> Since we have an awful lot of stuff in the last CF, and this patch
> doesn't seem particularly strategic, I've marked it "Returned with
> Feedback".

I noticed that this is in the upcoming CF 1 for v11. I'm signed up to review.

I'd like to point out that replacement selection is also obsolete,
which is something I brought up recently [1]. I don't actually have
any feature-driven reason to want to kill replacement selection - it's
just an annoyance at this point. I do think that RS is more deserving
of being killed than Polyphase merge, because it actually costs users
something to continue to support it. The replacement_sort_tuples GUC
particularly deserves to be removed.

It would be nice if killing RS was put in scope here. I'd appreciate
it, at least, since it would simplify the heap routines noticeably.
The original analysis that led to adding replacement_sort_tuples was
based on certain performance characteristics of merging that have
since changed by quite a bit, due to our work for v10.

[1] 
postgr.es/m/cah2-wzmmnjg_k0r9nqywmq3zjyjjk+hcbizynghay-zyjs6...@mail.gmail.com
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Peter Geoghegan


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Re: [HACKERS] Polyphase merge is obsolete

[Peter Geoghegan]

On Mon, Jan 16, 2017 at 5:56 PM, Peter Geoghegan  wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 12, 2016 at 10:16 AM, Heikki Linnakangas  wrote:
>> The number of *input* tapes we can use in each merge pass is still limited,
>> by the memory needed for the tape buffers and the merge heap, but only one
>> output tape is active at any time. The inactive output tapes consume very
>> few resources. So the whole idea of trying to efficiently reuse input tapes
>> as output tapes is pointless
>
> I picked this up again. The patch won't apply cleanly. Can you rebase?

Since we have an awful lot of stuff in the last CF, and this patch
doesn't seem particularly strategic, I've marked it "Returned with
Feedback".

Thanks
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Peter Geoghegan


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Re: [HACKERS] Polyphase merge is obsolete

[Peter Geoghegan]

On Wed, Oct 12, 2016 at 10:16 AM, Heikki Linnakangas  wrote:
> The number of *input* tapes we can use in each merge pass is still limited,
> by the memory needed for the tape buffers and the merge heap, but only one
> output tape is active at any time. The inactive output tapes consume very
> few resources. So the whole idea of trying to efficiently reuse input tapes
> as output tapes is pointless

I picked this up again. The patch won't apply cleanly. Can you rebase?
Also, please look at my bugfix for logtape.c free block management [1]
before doing so, as that might be prerequisite. Finally, I don't think
that the Logical tape pause/resume idea is compelling. Is it hard to
not do that, but still do everything else that you propose here?
That's what I lean towards doing right now.

Anyway, efficient use of tapes certainly mattered a lot more when
rewinding meant sitting around for a magnetic tape deck to physically
rewind. There is another algorithm in AoCP Vol III that lets us write
to tapes backwards, actually, which is motivated by similar obsolete
considerations about hardware. Why not write while we rewind, to avoid
doing nothing else while rewinding?!

Perhaps this patch should make a clean break from the "rewinding"
terminology. Perhaps you should rename LogicalTapeRewindForRead() to
LogicalTapePrepareForRead(), and so on. It's already a bit awkward
that that routine is called LogicalTapeRewindForRead(), because it
behaves significantly differently when a tape is frozen, and because
the whole point of logtape.c is space reuse that is completely
dissimilar to rewinding. (Space reuse is thus totally unlike how
polyphase merge is supposed to reuse space, which is all about
rewinding, and isn't nearly as eager. Same applies to K-way balanced
merge, of course.)

I think that the "rewinding" terminology does more harm than good, now
that it doesn't even help the Knuth reader to match Knuth's remarks to
what's going on in tuplesort.c. Just a thought.

> Let's switch over to a simple k-way balanced merge. Because it's simpler. If
> you're severely limited on memory, like when sorting 1GB of data with
> work_mem='1MB' or less, it's also slightly faster. I'm not too excited about
> the performance aspect, because in the typical case of a single-pass merge,
> there's no difference. But it would be worth changing on simplicity grounds,
> since we're mucking around in tuplesort.c anyway.

I actually think that the discontinuities in the merge scheduling are
worse than you suggest here. There doesn't have to be as extreme a
difference between work_mem and the size of input as you describe
here. As an example:

create table seq_tab(t int);
insert into seq_tab select generate_series(1, 1000);
set work_mem = '4MB';
select count(distinct t) from seq_tab;

The trace_sort output ends like this:

30119/2017-01-16 17:17:05 PST LOG:  begin datum sort: workMem = 4096,
randomAccess = f
30119/2017-01-16 17:17:05 PST LOG:  switching to external sort with 16
tapes: CPU: user: 0.07 s, system: 0.00 s, elapsed: 0.06 s
30119/2017-01-16 17:17:05 PST LOG:  starting quicksort of run 1: CPU:
user: 0.07 s, system: 0.00 s, elapsed: 0.06 s
30119/2017-01-16 17:17:05 PST LOG:  finished quicksort of run 1: CPU:
user: 0.07 s, system: 0.00 s, elapsed: 0.07 s
*** SNIP ***
30119/2017-01-16 17:17:08 PST LOG:  finished writing run 58 to tape 0:
CPU: user: 2.50 s, system: 0.27 s, elapsed: 2.78 s
30119/2017-01-16 17:17:08 PST LOG:  using 4095 KB of memory for read
buffers among 15 input tapes
30119/2017-01-16 17:17:08 PST LOG:  finished 1-way merge step: CPU:
user: 2.52 s, system: 0.28 s, elapsed: 2.80 s
30119/2017-01-16 17:17:08 PST LOG:  finished 4-way merge step: CPU:
user: 2.58 s, system: 0.30 s, elapsed: 2.89 s
30119/2017-01-16 17:17:08 PST LOG:  finished 14-way merge step: CPU:
user: 2.86 s, system: 0.34 s, elapsed: 3.20 s
30119/2017-01-16 17:17:08 PST LOG:  finished 14-way merge step: CPU:
user: 3.09 s, system: 0.41 s, elapsed: 3.51 s
30119/2017-01-16 17:17:09 PST LOG:  finished 15-way merge step: CPU:
user: 3.61 s, system: 0.52 s, elapsed: 4.14 s
30119/2017-01-16 17:17:09 PST LOG:  performsort done (except 15-way
final merge): CPU: user: 3.61 s, system: 0.52 s, elapsed: 4.14 s
30119/2017-01-16 17:17:10 PST LOG:  external sort ended, 14678 disk
blocks used: CPU: user: 4.93 s, system: 0.57 s, elapsed: 5.51 s

(This is the test case that Cy posted earlier today, for the bug that
was just fixed in master.)

The first 1-way merge step is clearly kind of a waste of time. We
incur no actual comparisons during this "merge", since there is only
one real run from each input tape (all other active tapes contain only
dummy runs). We are, in effect, just shoveling the tuples from that
single run from one tape to another (from one range in the underlying
logtape.c BufFile space to another). I've seen this quite a lot
before, over the years, while working on sorting. It's not that big of
a deal, but it's a degenerate case that 

Re: [HACKERS] Polyphase merge is obsolete

[Peter Geoghegan]

On Wed, Oct 12, 2016 at 10:16 AM, Heikki Linnakangas  wrote:
> Let's switch over to a simple k-way balanced merge. Because it's simpler. If
> you're severely limited on memory, like when sorting 1GB of data with
> work_mem='1MB' or less, it's also slightly faster. I'm not too excited about
> the performance aspect, because in the typical case of a single-pass merge,
> there's no difference. But it would be worth changing on simplicity grounds,
> since we're mucking around in tuplesort.c anyway.

This analysis seems sound. I suppose we might as well simplify things
while we're at it.


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Peter Geoghegan


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Re: [HACKERS] Polyphase merge is obsolete

[Heikki Linnakangas]

On 10/12/2016 08:27 PM, Tom Lane wrote:

Heikki Linnakangas  writes:

The beauty of the polyphase merge algorithm is that it allows reusing
input tapes as output tapes efficiently ... So the whole idea of trying to
efficiently reuse input tapes as output tapes is pointless.


It's been awhile since I looked at that code, but I'm quite certain that
it *never* thought it was dealing with actual tapes.  Rather, the point of
sticking with polyphase merge was that it allowed efficient incremental
re-use of temporary disk files, so that the maximum on-disk footprint was
only about equal to the volume of data to be sorted, rather than being a
multiple of that.  Have we thrown that property away?


No, there's no difference to that behavior. logtape.c takes care of 
incremental re-use of disk space, regardless of the merging pattern.


- Heikki



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Re: [HACKERS] Polyphase merge is obsolete

[Tom Lane]

Heikki Linnakangas  writes:
> The beauty of the polyphase merge algorithm is that it allows reusing 
> input tapes as output tapes efficiently ... So the whole idea of trying to 
> efficiently reuse input tapes as output tapes is pointless.

It's been awhile since I looked at that code, but I'm quite certain that
it *never* thought it was dealing with actual tapes.  Rather, the point of
sticking with polyphase merge was that it allowed efficient incremental
re-use of temporary disk files, so that the maximum on-disk footprint was
only about equal to the volume of data to be sorted, rather than being a
multiple of that.  Have we thrown that property away?

regards, tom lane


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