On Tue, May 10, 2016 at 10:05:13AM -0500, Kevin Grittner wrote: > On Tue, May 10, 2016 at 9:02 AM, Tom Lane <t...@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote: > > Kevin Grittner <kgri...@gmail.com> writes: > >> There were 75 samples each of "disabled" and "reverted" in the > >> spreadsheet. Averaging them all, I see this: > > > >> reverted: 290,660 TPS > >> disabled: 292,014 TPS > > > >> That's a 0.46% overall increase in performance with the patch, > >> disabled, compared to reverting it. I'm surprised that you > >> consider that to be a "clearly measurable difference". I mean, it > >> was measured and it is a difference, but it seems to be well within > >> the noise. Even though it is based on 150 samples, I'm not sure we > >> should consider it statistically significant. > > > > You don't have to guess about that --- compare it to the standard > > deviation within each group. > > My statistics skills are rusty, but I thought that just gives you > an effect size, not any idea of whether the effect is statistically > significant.
I discourage focusing on the statistical significance, because the hypothesis in question ("Applying revert.patch to 4bbc1a7e decreases 'pgbench -S -M prepared -j N -c N' tps by 0.46%.") is already an unreliable proxy for anything we care about. PostgreSQL performance variation due to incidental, ephemeral binary layout motion is roughly +/-5%. Assuming perfect confidence that 4bbc1a7e+revert.patch is 0.46% slower than 4bbc1a7e, the long-term effect of revert.patch could be anywhere from -5% to +4%. If one wishes to make benchmark-driven decisions about single-digit performance changes, one must control for binary layout effects: http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/87vbitb2zp....@news-spur.riddles.org.uk http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/20160416204452.ga1910...@tornado.leadboat.com nm -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers