On 1st of August 2018, Peter Eisentraut committed patch:
Allow multi-inserts during COPY into a partitioned table CopyFrom allows multi-inserts to be used for non-partitioned tables, but this was disabled for partitioned tables. The reason for this appeared to be that the tuple may not belong to the same partition as the previous tuple did. Not allowing multi-inserts here greatly slowed down imports into partitioned tables. These could take twice as long as a copy to an equivalent non-partitioned table. It seems wise to do something about this, so this change allows the multi-inserts by flushing the so-far inserted tuples to the partition when the next tuple does not belong to the same partition, or when the buffer fills. This improves performance when the next tuple in the stream commonly belongs to the same partition as the previous tuple. In cases where the target partition changes on every tuple, using multi-inserts slightly slows the performance. To get around this we track the average size of the batches that have been inserted and adaptively enable or disable multi-inserts based on the size of the batch. Some testing was done and the regression only seems to exist when the average size of the insert batch is close to 1, so let's just enable multi-inserts when the average size is at least 1.3. More performance testing might reveal a better number for, this, but since the slowdown was only 1-2% it does not seem critical enough to spend too much time calculating it. In any case it may depend on other factors rather than just the size of the batch. Allowing multi-inserts for partitions required a bit of work around the per-tuple memory contexts as we must flush the tuples when the next tuple does not belong the same partition. In which case there is no good time to reset the per-tuple context, as we've already built the new tuple by this time. In order to work around this we maintain two per-tuple contexts and just switch between them every time the partition changes and reset the old one. This does mean that the first of each batch of tuples is not allocated in the same memory context as the others, but that does not matter since we only reset the context once the previous batch has been inserted. Author: David Rowley <david.rowley@2ndquadrant.com>