Using binary encoding can save a lot of CPU cycles, both on the sender
and on the receiver. Since the walsender and walreceiver processes are
single threaded, this can matter a lot for the throughput if they are
bottlenecked on CPU.
This feature is only available in PG14, not PG13. It should be safe to
always enable because it's only used for types that support binary
encoding according to the PG docs:
> Even when this option is enabled, only data types that have binary
> send and receive functions will be transferred in binary.
But in case it causes problems, it can still be disabled by setting
`citus.enable_binary_protocol` to `false`.
Since PG14 we can now use binary encoding for arrays and composite types
that contain user defined types. This was fixed in this commit in
Postgres: 670c0a1d47
This change starts using that knowledge, by not necessarily falling back
to text encoding anymore for those types.
While doing this and testing a bit more I found various cases where
binary encoding would fail that our checks didn't cover. This fixes
those cases and adds tests for those. It also fixes EXPLAIN ANALYZE
never using binary encoding, which was a leftover of workaround that
was not necessary anymore.
Finally, it changes the default for both `citus.enable_binary_protocol`
and `citus.binary_worker_copy_format` to `true` for PG14 and up. In our
cloud offering `binary_worker_copy_format` already was true by default.
`enable_binary_protocol` had some bug with MX and user defined types,
this bug was fixed by the above mentioned fixes.
In #3901 the "Data received from worker(s)" sections were added to EXPLAIN
ANALYZE. After merging @pykello posted some review comments. This addresses
those comments as well as fixing a other issues that I found while addressing
them. The things this does:
1. Fix `EXPLAIN ANALYZE EXECUTE p1` to not increase received data on every
execution
2. Fix `EXPLAIN ANALYZE EXECUTE p1(1)` to not return 0 bytes as received data
allways.
3. Move `EXPLAIN ANALYZE` specific logic to `multi_explain.c` from
`adaptive_executor.c`
4. Change naming of new explain sections to `Tuple data received from node(s)`.
Firstly because a task can reference the coordinator too, so "worker(s)" was
incorrect. Secondly to indicate that this is tuple data and not all network
traffic that was performed.
5. Rename `totalReceivedData` in our codebase to `totalReceivedTupleData` to
make it clearer that it's a tuple data counter, not all network traffic.
6. Actually add `binary_protocol` test to `multi_schedule` (woops)
7. Fix a randomly failing test in `local_shard_execution.sql`.
This can save a lot of data to be sent in some cases, thus improving
performance for which inter query bandwidth is the bottleneck.
There's some issues with enabling this as default, so that's currently not done.
Jelte Fennema
Nils Dijk