• Tom Lane's avatar
    Fix O(N^2) performance problems in regular-expression compiler. · 579840ca
    Tom Lane authored
    Change the singly-linked in-arc and out-arc lists to be doubly-linked,
    so that arc deletion is constant time rather than having worst-case time
    proportional to the number of other arcs on the connected states.
    
    Modify the bulk arc transfer operations copyins(), copyouts(), moveins(),
    moveouts() so that they use a sort-and-merge algorithm whenever there's
    more than a small number of arcs to be copied or moved.  The previous
    method is O(N^2) in the number of arcs involved, because it performs
    duplicate checking independently for each copied arc.  The new method may
    change the ordering of existing arcs for the destination state, but nothing
    really cares about that.
    
    Provide another bulk arc copying method mergeins(), which is unused as
    of this commit but is needed for the next one.  It basically is like
    copyins(), but the source arcs might not all come from the same state.
    
    Replace the O(N^2) bubble-sort algorithm used in carcsort() with a qsort()
    call.
    
    These changes greatly improve the performance of regex compilation for
    large or complex regexes, at the cost of extra space for arc storage during
    compilation.  The original tradeoff was probably fine when it was made, but
    now we care more about speed and less about memory consumption.
    
    Back-patch to all supported branches.
    579840ca
regguts.h 15.8 KB