Previously, if you wanted anything besides C-string hash keys, you had to
specify a custom hashing function to hash_create(). Nearly all such
callers were specifying tag_hash or oid_hash; which is tedious, and rather
error-prone, since a caller could easily miss the opportunity to optimize
by using hash_uint32 when appropriate. Replace this with a design whereby
callers using simple binary-data keys just specify HASH_BLOBS and don't
need to mess with specific support functions. hash_create() itself will
take care of optimizing when the key size is four bytes.
This nets out saving a few hundred bytes of code space, and offers
a measurable performance improvement in tidbitmap.c (which was not
exploiting the opportunity to use hash_uint32 for its 4-byte keys).
There might be some wins elsewhere too, I didn't analyze closely.
In future we could look into offering a similar optimized hashing function
for 8-byte keys. Under this design that could be done in a centralized
and machine-independent fashion, whereas getting it right for keys of
platform-dependent sizes would've been notationally painful before.
For the moment, the old way still works fine, so as not to break source
code compatibility for loadable modules. Eventually we might want to
remove tag_hash and friends from the exported API altogether, since there's
no real need for them to be explicitly referenced from outside dynahash.c.
Teodor Sigaev and Tom Lane
delivering a well-randomized hash value. I got religion on this after
observing that performance of multi-batch hash join degrades terribly if the
higher-order bits of hash values aren't random, as indeed was true for say
hashes of small integer values. It's now expected and documented that hash
functions should use hash_any or some comparable method to ensure that all
bits of their output are about equally random.
initdb forced because this change invalidates existing hash indexes. For the
same reason, this isn't back-patchable; the hash join performance problem
will get a band-aid fix in the back branches.
to performance. (A wholesale effort to get rid of strncpy should be
undertaken sometime, but not during beta.) This commit also fixes dynahash.c
to correctly truncate overlength string keys for hashtables, so that its
callers don't have to anymore.
whose keys are OIDs. The only one that looks particularly performance
critical is the relcache hashtable, but as long as we've got the function
we may as well use it wherever it's applicable.
Also performed an initial run through of upgrading our Copyright date to
extend to 2005 ... first run here was very simple ... change everything
where: grep 1996-2004 && the word 'Copyright' ... scanned through the
generated list with 'less' first, and after, to make sure that I only
picked up the right entries ...
as well as the hash function (formerly the comparison function was hardwired
as memcmp()). This makes it possible to eliminate the special-purpose
hashtable management code in execGrouping.c in favor of using dynahash to
manage tuple hashtables; which is a win because dynahash knows how to expand
a hashtable when the original size estimate was too small, whereas the
special-purpose code was too stupid to do that. (See recent gripe from
Stephan Szabo about poor performance when hash table size estimate is way
off.) Free side benefit: when using string_hash, the default comparison
function is now strncmp() instead of memcmp(). This should eliminate some
part of the overhead associated with larger NAMEDATALEN values.
portability issues). Caller-visible data structures are now allocated
on MAXALIGN boundaries, allowing safe use of datatypes wider than 'long'.
Rejigger hash_create API so that caller specifies size of key and
total size of entry, not size of key and size of rest of entry.
This simplifies life considerably since each number is just a sizeof(),
and padding issues etc. are taken care of automatically.
running gcc and HP's cc with warnings cranked way up. Signed vs unsigned
comparisons, routines declared static and then defined not-static,
that kind of thing. Tedious, but perhaps useful...
Bruce Momjian
Tom Lane
Magnus Hagander
PostgreSQL Daemon
Marc G. Fournier