Re: qsort again (was Re: [PERFORM] Strange Create Index behaviour)

2006-03-21 Thread Tom Lane
Last month I wrote: > It seems clear that our qsort.c is doing a pretty awful job of picking > qsort pivots, while glibc is mostly managing not to make that mistake. I re-ran Gary's test script using the just-committed improvements to qsort.c, and got pretty nice numbers (attached --- compare to h

Re: qsort again (was Re: [PERFORM] Strange Create Index behaviour)

2006-02-15 Thread Christopher Kings-Lynne
Ouch! That confirms my problem. I generated the random test case because it was easier than including the dump of my tables, but you can appreciate that tables 20 times the size are basically crippled when it comes to creating an index on them. I have to say that I restored a few gigabyte dum

Re: qsort again (was Re: [PERFORM] Strange Create Index behaviour)

2006-02-15 Thread Tom Lane
Ron <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > How are we choosing our pivots? See qsort.c: it looks like median of nine equally spaced inputs (ie, the 1/8th points of the initial input array, plus the end points), implemented as two rounds of median-of-three choices. With half of the data inputs zero, it's n

Re: qsort again (was Re: [PERFORM] Strange Create Index behaviour)

2006-02-15 Thread Tom Lane
Gary Doades <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Is this likely to hit me in a random fashion during normal operation, > joins, sorts, order by for example? Yup, anytime you're passing data with that kind of distribution through a sort. > So the options are: > 1) Fix the included qsort.c code and use t

Re: qsort again (was Re: [PERFORM] Strange Create Index behaviour)

2006-02-15 Thread Gary Doades
Tom Lane wrote: For some reason I hadn't immediately twigged to the fact that your test script is just N repetitions of the exact same structure with random data. So it's not so surprising that you get random variations in behavior with different test data sets. > It seems clear that our qsort