On Wed, May 15, 2024 at 08:48:02PM -0700, Andres Freund wrote: > Hi, > > On 2024-05-15 10:38:20 +0200, Alvaro Herrera wrote: > > I disagree with this. IMO the impact of the Sawada/Naylor change is > > likely to be enormous for people with large tables and large numbers of > > tuples to clean up (I know we've had a number of customers in this > > situation, I can't imagine any Postgres service provider that doesn't). > > The fact that maintenance_work_mem is no longer capped at 1GB is very > > important and I think we should mention that explicitly in the release > > notes, as setting it higher could make a big difference in vacuum run > > times. > > +many. > > We're having this debate every release. I think the ongoing reticence to note > performance improvements in the release notes is hurting Postgres. > > For one, performance improvements are one of the prime reason users > upgrade. Without them being noted anywhere more dense than the commit log, > it's very hard to figure out what improved for users. A halfway widely > applicable performance improvement is far more impactful than many of the > feature changes we do list in the release notes.
I agree the impact of performance improvements are often greater than the average release note item. However, if people expect Postgres to be faster, is it important for them to know _why_ it is faster? If we add a new flag to a command, people will want to know about it so they can make use of it, or if there is a performance improvement that allows new workloads, they will want to know about that too so they can consider those workloads. On the flip side, a performance improvement that makes everything 10% faster has little behavioral change for users, and in fact I think we get ~6% faster in every major release. > For another, it's also very frustrating for developers that focus on > performance. The reticence to note their work, while noting other, far > smaller, things in the release notes, pretty much tells us that our work isn't > valued. Yes, but are we willing to add text that every user will have to read just for this purpose? One think we _could_ do is to create a generic performance release note item saying performance has been improved in the following areas, with no more details, but we can list the authors on the item. -- Bruce Momjian <br...@momjian.us> https://momjian.us EDB https://enterprisedb.com Only you can decide what is important to you.