On 19 July 2017 at 07:26, Tom Lane <t...@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote: > Justin Pryzby <pry...@telsasoft.com> writes: > > I've seen this before while doing SET STATISTICS on a larger number of > columns > > using xargs, but just came up while doing ADD of a large number of > columns. > > Seems to be roughly linear in number of children but superlinear WRT > columns. > > I think having to do with catalog update / cache invalidation with many > > ALTERs*children*columns? > > I poked into this a bit. The operation is necessarily roughly O(N^2) in > the number of columns, because we rebuild the affected table's relcache > entry after each elementary ADD COLUMN operation, and one of the principal > components of that cost is reading all the pg_attribute entries. However, > that should only be a time cost not a space cost. Eventually I traced the > O(N^2) space consumption to RememberToFreeTupleDescAtEOX, which seems to > have been introduced in Simon's commit e5550d5fe, and which strikes me as > a kluge of the first magnitude. Unless I am missing something, that > function's design concept can fairly be characterized as "let's leak > memory like there's no tomorrow, on the off chance that somebody somewhere > is ignoring basic coding rules". > > I tried ripping that out, and the peak space consumption of your example > (with 20 child tables and 1600 columns) decreased from ~3GB to ~200MB. > Moreover, the system still passes make check-world, so it's not clear > to me what excuse this code has to live. > > It's probably a bit late in the v10 cycle to be taking any risks in > this area, but I'd vote for ripping out RememberToFreeTupleDescAtEOX > as soon as the v11 cycle opens, unless someone can show an example > of non-broken coding that requires it. (And if so, there ought to > be a regression test incorporating that.)
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Just FYI, I believe Simon's currently on holiday, so may not notice this discussion as promptly as usual. -- Craig Ringer http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/ PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Training & Services
