Re: [PERFORM] 8.1 -> 8.4 regression

2010-02-16 Thread Tom Lane
Ben Chobot  writes:
> Awesome, that did the trick. Thanks Tom! So I understand better, why is my 
> case not the normal, better case?

Well, the short answer is that the 8.4 changes here are in the nature of
two steps forward and one step back.  The long-term goal is to increase
the planner's ability to choose among different join orders; but we're
getting rid of one restriction at a time, and sometimes the interactions
of those restrictions produce unwanted results like the older code being
able to find a better plan than the new code can.

> (I assume the long-term fix is post-9.0, right?)

Yeah, fraid so.  I've been mostly buried in non-planner work in the 9.0
cycle, but hope to get back to this and other problems in the next
cycle.

regards, tom lane

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Re: [PERFORM] 8.1 -> 8.4 regression

2010-02-15 Thread Ben Chobot
Awesome, that did the trick. Thanks Tom! So I understand better, why is my case 
not the normal, better case?

(I assume the long-term fix is post-9.0, right?)

On Feb 15, 2010, at 9:26 AM, Tom Lane wrote:

> Ben Chobot  writes:
>> On Feb 15, 2010, at 7:59 AM, Kevin Grittner wrote:
>>> Could you show the query, along with table definitions (including
>>> indexes)?
> 
>> Oh, yeah, I suppose that would help. :)
> 
>> http://wood.silentmedia.com/bench/query_and_definitions
> 
> It looks like the problem is that the EXISTS sub-query is getting
> converted into a join; which is usually a good thing but in this case it
> interferes with letting the users table not be scanned completely.
> The long-term fix for that is to support nestloop inner indexscans where
> the index key comes from more than one join level up, but making that
> happen isn't too easy.
> 
> In the meantime, I think you could defeat the "optimization" by
> inserting LIMIT 1 in the EXISTS sub-query.
> 
>   regards, tom lane


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Re: [PERFORM] 8.1 -> 8.4 regression

2010-02-15 Thread Tom Lane
Ben Chobot  writes:
> On Feb 15, 2010, at 7:59 AM, Kevin Grittner wrote:
>> Could you show the query, along with table definitions (including
>> indexes)?

> Oh, yeah, I suppose that would help. :)

> http://wood.silentmedia.com/bench/query_and_definitions

It looks like the problem is that the EXISTS sub-query is getting
converted into a join; which is usually a good thing but in this case it
interferes with letting the users table not be scanned completely.
The long-term fix for that is to support nestloop inner indexscans where
the index key comes from more than one join level up, but making that
happen isn't too easy.

In the meantime, I think you could defeat the "optimization" by
inserting LIMIT 1 in the EXISTS sub-query.

regards, tom lane

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Re: [PERFORM] 8.1 -> 8.4 regression

2010-02-15 Thread Ben Chobot
On Feb 15, 2010, at 7:59 AM, Kevin Grittner wrote:

> Could you show the query, along with table definitions (including
> indexes)?

Oh, yeah, I suppose that would help. :)

http://wood.silentmedia.com/bench/query_and_definitions

(I'd paste them here for posterity but I speculate the reason my first few 
attempts to ask this question never went through were because of the size of 
the email.)
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Re: [PERFORM] 8.1 -> 8.4 regression

2010-02-15 Thread Kevin Grittner
Ben Chobot  wrote:
 
> Here is the plan on 8.4.2:
 
> Here is the very much less compact plan for the same query on
> 8.1.19:
 
Could you show the query, along with table definitions (including
indexes)?
 
-Kevin

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Re: [PERFORM] 8.1 -> 8.4 regression

2010-02-15 Thread Dennis Björklund
Can you force 8.4 to generate the same plan as 8.1? For example by running

  SET enable_hashjoin = off;

before you run EXPLAIN on the query? If so, then we can compare the
numbers from the forced plan with the old plan and maybe figure out why it
didn't use the same old plan in 8.4 as it did in 8.1.

Note that the solution is not to force the plan, but it can give us more
information.

/Dennis

> is at least one query which has degraded in performance quite a bit. Here
> is the plan on 8.4.2:
> http://wood.silentmedia.com/bench/842
>
> Here is the very much less compact plan for the same query on 8.1.19:
> http://wood.silentmedia.com/bench/8119



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[PERFORM] 8.1 -> 8.4 regression

2010-02-14 Thread Ben Chobot
(Apologies if this ends up coming through multiple times - my first attempts 
seem to have gotten stuck.)

We recently took the much needed step in moving from 8.1.19 to 8.4.2. We took 
the downtime opportunity to also massively upgrade our hardware. Overall, this 
has been the major improvement you would expect, but there is at least one 
query which has degraded in performance quite a bit. Here is the plan on 8.4.2:
http://wood.silentmedia.com/bench/842

Here is the very much less compact plan for the same query on 8.1.19:
http://wood.silentmedia.com/bench/8119

I think the problem might be that 8.1.19 likes to use a few indexes which 8.4.2 
doesn't seem to think would be worthwhile. Perhaps that's because on the new 
hardware almost everything fits into ram, but even so, it would be better if 
those indexes were used. The other differences I can think of are 
random_page_cost (2 on the new hardware vs. 2.5 on the old), a ten-fold 
increase in effective_cache_size, doubling work_mem from 8MB to 16MB, and that 
we analyze up to 100 samples per attribute on 8.4.2, while our 8.1.19 install 
does 10 at most. Still, the estimates for both plans seem fairly accurate, at 
least where there are differences in which indexes are getting used.

Everything has been analyzed recently, and given that 8.4.2 already has 10x 
more analysis samples than 8.1.19, I'm not sure what to do to coax it towards 
using those indexes.
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