On 10.01.22 07:00, Julien Rouhaud wrote:
And then I changed in varstr_cmp():

         if (collid != DEFAULT_COLLATION_OID)
             mylocale = pg_newlocale_from_collation(collid);

to just

         mylocale = pg_newlocale_from_collation(collid);

I find that the \timing results are indistinguishable.  (I used locale
"en_US.UTF-8" and made sure that that code path is actually hit.)

Does anyone have other insights?

Looking at the git history, you added this comment in 414c5a2ea65.

After a bit a digging in the lists, I found that you introduced it to fix a
reported 13% slowdown in varstr_cmp():
https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/20110129075253.GA18784%40tornado.leadboat.com
https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/1296748408.6442.1.camel%40vanquo.pezone.net

So I tried to run Noah's benchmark to see if I could reproduce the slowdown.
Unfortunately the results I'm getting don't really make sense as removing the
optimisation brings a 15% speedup, and with a few more runs I can see that I
have about 25% noise, so there isn't much I can do to help.

Heh, I had that same experience, it actually got faster without the optimization, but then got lost in the noise on further testing.

Looking back at those discussions, I don't think those old test results are relevant anymore. In the patch that was being tested there, pg_newlocale_from_collation(), did not contain

    if (collid == DEFAULT_COLLATION_OID)
        return (pg_locale_t) 0;

so the default collation actually went through most or all of the function and did a lot of work. That would understandably be quite slow. But just calling a function and returning immediately should not be a problem. Otherwise, the call to check_collation_set() in varstr_cmp() and elsewhere would be just as bad.

So, unless there are concerns, I'm going to see about making a patch to call pg_newlocale_from_collation() even with the default collation. That would make the actual feature patch quite a bit smaller, since we won't have to patch every call site of pg_newlocale_from_collation().


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