On Tuesday, November 29, 2011 07:48:37 PM Peter Geoghegan wrote: > On 29 November 2011 15:31, Bruce Momjian <br...@momjian.us> wrote: > > These are exciting advanced you are producing and I am hopeful we can > > get this included in Postgres 9.2. > > Thanks Bruce. > > >I have mentioned already that I > > > > think parallelism is the next big Postgres challenge, and of course, one > > of the first areas for parallelism is sorting. > > I'm not sure that sorting has that much to recommend it as an initial > target of some new backend parallelism other than being easy to > implement. I've observed the qsort_arg specialisations in this patch > out-perform stock qsort_arg by as much as almost 3 times. However, the > largest decrease in a query's time that I've observed was 45%, and > that was for a contrived worst-case for quicksort, but about 25% is > much more typical of queries similar to the ones I've shown, for more > normative data distributions. While that's a respectable gain, it > isn't a paradigm shifting one, and it makes parallelising qsort itself > for further improvements quite a lot less attractive - there's too > many other sources of overhead. I think that logic is faulty.
For one I doubt that anybody is honestly suggesting paralellism inside qsort itself. It seems more likely/sensible to implement that on the level of mergesorting. Index builds for example could hugely benefit from improvements on that level. With index build you often get pretty non-optimal data distributions btw... I also seriously doubt that you will find an area inside pg's executor where you find that paralellizing them will provide a near linear scale without much, much more work. Also I wouldn't consider sorting the easiest target - especially on a qsort level - for parallelization as you constantly need to execute user defined operators with multiple input tuples which has the usual problems. COPY parsing + inserting or such seems to be way easier target for example. Even doing hashing + aggregation in different threads seems likely to be easier. Andres -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers