This test script verifies that KNN searches of an SP-GiST index
produce the same sort order as a seqscan-and-sort. The FULL JOINs
used for that are exceedingly slow, however. Investigation shows
that the problem is that the initial join is on the rank() values,
and we have a lot of duplicates due to the data set containing 1000
duplicate points. We're therefore going to produce 1000000 join
rows that have to be thrown away again by the join filter.
We can improve matters by using row_number() instead of rank(),
so that the initial join keys are unique. The catch is that
that makes the results sensitive to the sorting of rows with
equal distances from the reference point. That doesn't matter
for the actually-equal points, but as luck would have it, the
data set also contains two distinct points that have identical
distances to the origin. So those two rows could legitimately
appear in either order, causing unwanted output from the check
queries.
However, it doesn't seem like it's the job of this test to
check whether the <-> operator correctly computes distances;
its charter is just to verify that SP-GiST emits the values
in distance order. So we can dodge the indeterminacy problem
by having the check only compare row numbers and distances
not the actual point values.
This change reduces the run time of create_index_spgist by a good
three-quarters, on my machine, with ensuing beneficial effects on
the runtime of create_index (thanks to interactions with CREATE
INDEX CONCURRENTLY tests in the latter). I see a net improvement
of more than 2X in the runtime of their parallel test group.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/735.1554935715@sss.pgh.pa.us
The point of this change is to increase the potential for parallelism
while running the core regression tests. Most people these days are
using parallel testing modes on multi-core machines, so we might as
well try a bit harder to keep multiple cores busy. Hence, a test that
runs much longer than others in its parallel group is a candidate to
be sub-divided.
In this patch, create_index.sql and join.sql are split up.
I haven't changed the content of the tests in any way, just
moved them.
I moved create_index.sql's SP-GiST-related tests into a new script
create_index_spgist, and moved its btree multilevel page deletion test
over to the existing script btree_index. (btree_index is a more natural
home for that test, and it's shorter than others in its parallel group,
so this doesn't hurt total runtime of that group.) There might be
room for more aggressive splitting of create_index, but this is enough
to improve matters considerably.
Likewise, I moved join.sql's "exercises for the hash join code" into
a new file join_hash. Those exercises contributed three-quarters of
the script's runtime. Which might well be excessive ... but for the
moment, I'm satisfied with shoving them into a different parallel
group, where they can share runtime with the roughly-equally-lengthy
gist test.
(Note for anybody following along at home: there are interesting
interactions between the runtimes of create_index and anything running
in parallel with it, because the tests of CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY
in that file will repeatedly block waiting for concurrent transactions
to commit. As committed in this patch, create_index and
create_index_spgist have roughly equal runtimes, but that's mostly an
artifact of forced synchronization of the CONCURRENTLY tests; when run
serially, create_index is much faster. A followup patch will reduce
the runtime of create_index_spgist and thereby also create_index.)
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/735.1554935715@sss.pgh.pa.us
Tom Lane