Re: is a special cost for external sort?

On Thu, Jul 18, 2013 at 9:14 AM, Pavel Stehule <pavel(dot)stehule(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> Hello
>
> I found a slow query with large external sort. I expect, so external
> sort should be penalized. Is it?

It tries to, but it doesn't seem to be much good at it. In
particular, I think it does a poor job of estimating the CPU cost of
an external sort relative to an in-memory sort of a slightly smaller
data set. In my experience adding the single tuple that actually
pushes you over the work_mem limit costs about 3x in CPU.

It is one of those things I started looking into a few times, but
never got anywhere before getting distracted.

Cheers,

Jeff