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Tom Lane authored
After detecting a sub-match "dissect" failure (i.e., a backref match failure) in the i'th sub-match of an iteration node, we should proceed by adjusting the attempted length of the i'th submatch. As coded, though, these functions changed the attempted length of the *last* sub-match, and only after exhausting all possibilities for that would they back up to adjust the next-to-last sub-match, and then the second-from-last, etc; all of which is wasted effort, since only changing the start or length of the i'th sub-match can possibly make it succeed. This oversight creates the possibility for exponentially bad performance. Fortunately the problem is masked in most cases by optimizations or constraints applied elsewhere; which explains why we'd not noticed it before. But it is possible to reach the problem with fairly simple, if contrived, regexps. Oversight in my commit 173e29aa. That's pretty ancient now, so back-patch to all supported branches. Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/1808998.1629412269@sss.pgh.pa.us
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