malisper

hace 23 horasdiscuss

This is correct. We first used c2rust to translate the C into unsafe Rust. The generated Rust code had one crate per C compilation unit. We then took the unsafe unidiomatic Rust and one crate at a time converted it to safe Rust.

malisper

ayerdiscuss

Actually the inverse. I initially gave claude an outline of what I wanted, had it do some research into how to write idiomatic rust, and then had it draft a series of skills to do the work. I would then try out the skills, audit the results, and then give claude feedback based on what I was seeing. Once I started getting runs where the results were working, I would start to scale things up and audit things with an exponential backoff.

malisper

ayerdiscuss

Nothing major yet. Once I wrap up the performance work I'm doing I'll start looking at the best way to go about testing. I suspect there's a lot of novel things you can do with agents.

malisper

ayerdiscuss

Thank you! I'm a big fan of your writing. I wanted to make sure there was something people could try out so I could show pgrust was real and not vaporware.

malisper

ayerdiscuss

Thank you!

malisper

anteayerdiscuss

> Threads does not offer any major performance advantage

This is very not true. When it comes to parallel queries, a process model adds a ton of overhead. You can't pass pointers between processes because the address space is different. This adds a ton of overhead in a bunch of different places. For example when doing a parallel hash join, Postgres will have each worker build a local hash table. Then it will take all the tuples out of the local hash table and copy them through shared memory to the leader who will then construct a new hash table. This duplicates a lot of work as you have to hash the tuples multiple times.

A lot of getting to Clickhouse level performance was making better use of parallelism.

malisper

anteayerdiscuss

I spent a couple years managing a Postgres cluster with a petabyte of data. I wrote a couple blog posts from my work then[0][1]. I also wrote dozens of posts on the Postgres internals[2]. I've also given talks on how to generate fractals with SQL[3] and how to write a lisp interpreter in SQL[4].

[0] https://www.heap.io/blog/testing-database-changes-right-way

[1] https://www.heap.io/blog/analyzing-performance-millions-sql-...

[2] https://malisper.me/table-of-contents/

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKoYIvMFnoQ

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPSMH8w7nfw

malisper

anteayerdiscuss

That's something I eventually want to fix. The challenge is the storage format is so integral to Postgres that it's going to be a huge PITA to come up with a novel design.

Right now OrioleDB is in beta. Once that becomes production ready, I'll evaluate incorporating it into pgrust.

For Ben Dicken, he has seen the project: https://x.com/BenjDicken/status/2074512043462603236. We're still working on all the novel features so I don't think it meets his bar quite yet.

malisper

anteayerdiscuss

My approach has changed throughout the course of this project. Throughout most of the project, we were working off of a c2rust translation of Postgres to Rust. That gave us a bunch of Rust code that was unsafe but did pass the Postgres test suite and was fast. c2rust had split Postgres into 1000 different crates. We then went through 1 by 1 and rewrote each crate into idiomatic rust.

This naturally lended itself to a suite of skills to describe how to rewrite a crate from unsafe rust to idiomatic rust. The main three skills I had were 1) a skill for identifying the next crates to port 2) a skill for rewriting a crate and 3) a skill for auditing a crate and making sure there weren't any outstanding issues.

My exact approach for managing subagents changed throughout the project. Initially I was doing parallel coding sessions with Conductor. After dynamic workflows came out, I used that as it was really easy to spin up dozens of parallel subagents and manage it from a single orchestrator. Over time I switched from using dynamic workflows to manually spinning up subagents from a central agent. The issue with dynamic workflows is they waterfall. Each step needs to finish before the next one starts. By manually spinning up subagents, I could have claude start porting a new crate as soon as a prior subagent finished.

malisper

anteayerdiscuss

Can you elaborate on the use case for query multiplexing? Is it so your client would only need to establish one connection with Postgres and then could run as many queries as it wanted?

malisper

anteayerdiscuss

> The rewrite also could have simpler code in some cases

The Rust code is a literal translation of the Postgres code which returns the value at the end instead of an early return.

> I see a lot of MemoryContext

MemoryContext in C is used for multiple reasons: 1) performance 2) keeping track of how much memory has been allocated and where and 3) preventing memory leaks.

Reasons 1 and 2 are still relevant for Rust. The challenge is in C memory contexts are stored in a global variable. Global variables don't work well with the rust borrow checker so I opted for passing memory contexts as function arguments instead.

malisper

anteayerdiscuss

Yep! The new version of pgrust supports batch based execution and a columnar format. I'm curious how you got δx to perform that well? From what I've seen a columnar layout only gets you part of the way and really good parallelism and really fast hash tables seem to make up a significant portion of why Clickhouse is faster.

malisper

anteayerdiscuss

Rust actually made the change pretty simple. The main changes are:

  - Use thread local variables
  - Move everything from shared memory to process memory
  - Use threads instead of processes

I've started to see meaningful benefits by changing the parallel algorithms to use a shared memory space. For example parallel hash joins have to copy tuples through shared memory to pass them between workers. That's just not something I have to do.

malisper

anteayerdiscuss

> why is the parser unsafe at all?!?

The parser was generated by c2rust. The Postgres parser is generated from yacc/bison itself so I didn't bother making it idiomatic.

malisper

anteayerdiscuss

Note that most of the unsafes are confined to the parser which was generated by running c2rust over the Postgres parser. The Postgres parser is itself generated from yacc/bison, so I decided to port it over mechanically rather than idiomatically.

If there's particular unsafes that you think are egregious, let me know.

malisper

anteayerdiscuss

Note that the code I believe you are referring to is from the parser which was generated with c2rust. The Postgres parser is generated from yacc/bison so rather than try to rewrite it idiomatically, I did so mechanically.

malisper

anteayerdiscuss

The 50% is specifically on percona-tpcc[0]. I got there through a mix of batching (postgres processes a row at a time), prefetching, and several handful of other optimizations.

  [0] https://github.com/Percona-Lab/sysbench-tpcc

malisper

anteayerdiscuss

It is theoretically possible to have a Rust port of Postgres support extensions. If you make all the relevant functions and structures ABI compatible with Postgres, extensions should work. The issue is the moment you're dealing with C pointers and C strings, pretty much all the code you have to write is unsafe.

malisper

anteayerdiscuss

The version in the GitHub repo is ~8x slower than Postgres. I have a new unpublished version that is 50% faster than Postgres on transactional workloads and ~300x faster on analytical workloads.

malisper

anteayerdiscuss

It's not used in production. I've been using different benchmarks to compare the performance vs other systems. Namely sysbench-tpcc[0] and clickbench[1]

[0] https://github.com/Percona-Lab/sysbench-tpcc

[1] https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickBench

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