enum and array in preparated statement hammer performance

• asyncpg version: asyncpg==0.23.0 (also tested with asyncpg==0.21.0
• PostgreSQL version: PostgreSQL 13.3 (Ubuntu 13.3-0ubuntu0.21.04.1) on x86_64-pc-linux-gnu, compiled by gcc (Ubuntu 10.3.0-1ubuntu1) 10.3.0, 64-bit
• Python version: Python 3.8.10
• Platform: Ubuntu 21.04
• Do you use pgbouncer?: no
• Did you install asyncpg with pip?: yes
• Can the issue be reproduced under both asyncio and uvloop?: yes, makes no different

I have no idea what’s going on here, there’s a very weird (and big!) performance impact sometimes when you use an enum and a list/array together as prepared arguments.

I had this on a production system, but here is a minimal reproduction of the problem (debug is just here to test performance, it makes not difference:

import asyncio
import asyncpg

from devtools import debug


async def main():
    conn = await asyncpg.connect('postgresql://postgres@localhost/test')
    try:
        await conn.execute(
            """
            drop table if exists users;
            drop type if exists user_spam;
            create type user_spam as enum ('foo', 'bar');
            
            create table users(
                id serial primary key,
                spam_enum user_spam default 'foo',
                spam_varchar varchar(5) default 'foo',
                str_list varchar(31)[]
            )
            """
        )

        with debug.timer('spam_enum,variables,two-fields'):
            await conn.execute(
                'insert into users (spam_enum, str_list) values ($1, $2) returning id',
                'bar', ('foo', 'bar')
            )
        with debug.timer('spam_enum,variables,only-spam_enum'):
            await conn.execute('insert into users (spam_enum) values ($1) returning id', 'bar')

        with debug.timer('spam_enum,variables,only-str_list'):
            await conn.execute('insert into users (str_list) values ($1) returning id', ('foo', 'bar'))

        with debug.timer('spam_varchar,variables,two-fields'):
            await conn.execute(
                'insert into users (spam_varchar, str_list) values ($1, $2) returning id',
                'bar', ('foo', 'bar')
            )

        with debug.timer('spam_enum,static,two-fields'):
            await conn.execute(
                "insert into users (spam_enum, str_list) values ('bar', '{foo,bar}'::varchar[]) returning id",
            )

        with debug.timer('spam_varchar,static,two-fields'):
            await conn.execute(
                "insert into users (spam_varchar, str_list) values ('bar', '{foo,bar}'::varchar[]) returning id",
            )

        print('number of users created:', await conn.fetchval('select count(*) from users'))
    finally:
        await conn.close()

if __name__ == '__main__':
    asyncio.run(main())

Output:

spam_enum,variables,two-fields:      0.679s elapsed
spam_enum,variables,only-spam_enum:  0.000s elapsed
spam_enum,variables,only-str_list:   0.000s elapsed
spam_varchar,variables,two-fields:   0.000s elapsed
spam_enum,static,two-fields:         0.000s elapsed
spam_varchar,static,two-fields:      0.000s elapsed
number of users created:             6

---

For now my work around is to use simple varchar fields instead of enums, but I’d love to know why this is happening.

[elprans]

jit really improves performance?

It only makes sense for queries that do lots of computation in complex expressions over a large number of rows. Unfortunately, Postgres deems asyncpg’s introspection query as “complex” and triggers JIT compilation on it, even though the query isn’t that complicated, just large.

[elprans]

This is a frequent source of grief, actually, there’s been a bunch of reports like this, so we might want to put a mitigation in place and disable jit locally when running the introspection query. Unfortunately, that’ll increase its overhead when jit is off, although not as dramatically as you were seeing here.