Improve performance of our private version of qsort. Per recent testing,

the logic it contained to switch to insertion sort for near-sorted input was
in fact a big loss, because it could fairly easily be fooled into applying
insertion sort to large subfiles that weren't all that well ordered.  Remove
that, and instead add a simple check for already-perfectly-sorted input, as
per suggestion from Dann Corbit.  This adds at worst O(N*lgN) overhead, and
usually far less, while sometimes allowing a subfile sort to finish in O(N)
time.  Preliminary testing says this is an improvement over the basic
Bentley & McIlroy code for many nonrandom inputs, and it costs almost
nothing when the input is random.

diff --git a/src/port/qsort.c b/src/port/qsort.c
index 71c1f15..a7aa8ce 100644 (file)
--- a/src/port/qsort.c
+++ b/src/port/qsort.c
@@ -2,8 +2,10 @@
  *     Modifications from vanilla NetBSD source:
  *       Add do ... while() macro fix
  *       Remove __inline, _DIAGASSERTs, __P
+ *       Remove ill-considered "swap_cnt" switch to insertion sort,
+ *       in favor of a simple check for presorted input.
  *
- *     $PostgreSQL: pgsql/src/port/qsort.c,v 1.8 2005/10/15 02:49:51 momjian Exp $
+ *     $PostgreSQL: pgsql/src/port/qsort.c,v 1.9 2006/03/21 19:49:15 tgl Exp $
  */
 
 /*     $NetBSD: qsort.c,v 1.13 2003/08/07 16:43:42 agc Exp $   */
@@ -47,7 +49,11 @@ static void swapfunc(char *, char *, size_t, int);
 #define min(a, b)      ((a) < (b) ? (a) : (b))
 
 /*
- * Qsort routine from Bentley & McIlroy's "Engineering a Sort Function".
+ * Qsort routine based on J. L. Bentley and M. D. McIlroy,
+ * "Engineering a sort function",
+ * Software--Practice and Experience 23 (1993) 1249-1265.
+ * We have modified their original by adding a check for already-sorted input,
+ * which seems to be a win per discussions on pgsql-hackers around 2006-03-21.
  */
 #define swapcode(TYPE, parmi, parmj, n) \
 do {           \
@@ -116,10 +122,9 @@ int                        (*cmp) (const void *, const void *);
        int                     d,
                                r,
                                swaptype,
-                               swap_cnt;
+                               presorted;
 
 loop:SWAPINIT(a, es);
-       swap_cnt = 0;
        if (n < 7)
        {
                for (pm = (char *) a + es; pm < (char *) a + n * es; pm += es)
@@ -128,6 +133,17 @@ loop:SWAPINIT(a, es);
                                swap(pl, pl - es);
                return;
        }
+       presorted = 1;
+       for (pm = (char *) a + es; pm < (char *) a + n * es; pm += es)
+       {
+               if (cmp(pm - es, pm) > 0)
+               {
+                       presorted = 0;
+                       break;
+               }
+       }
+       if (presorted)
+               return;
        pm = (char *) a + (n / 2) * es;
        if (n > 7)
        {
@@ -144,7 +160,6 @@ loop:SWAPINIT(a, es);
        }
        swap(a, pm);
        pa = pb = (char *) a + es;
-
        pc = pd = (char *) a + (n - 1) * es;
        for (;;)
        {
@@ -152,7 +167,6 @@ loop:SWAPINIT(a, es);
                {
                        if (r == 0)
                        {
-                               swap_cnt = 1;
                                swap(pa, pb);
                                pa += es;
                        }
@@ -162,7 +176,6 @@ loop:SWAPINIT(a, es);
                {
                        if (r == 0)
                        {
-                               swap_cnt = 1;
                                swap(pc, pd);
                                pd -= es;
                        }
@@ -171,19 +184,9 @@ loop:SWAPINIT(a, es);
                if (pb > pc)
                        break;
                swap(pb, pc);
-               swap_cnt = 1;
                pb += es;
                pc -= es;
        }
-       if (swap_cnt == 0)
-       {                                                       /* Switch to insertion sort */
-               for (pm = (char *) a + es; pm < (char *) a + n * es; pm += es)
-                       for (pl = pm; pl > (char *) a && cmp(pl - es, pl) > 0;
-                                pl -= es)
-                               swap(pl, pl - es);
-               return;
-       }
-
        pn = (char *) a + n * es;
        r = min(pa - (char *) a, pb - pa);
        vecswap(a, pb - r, r);