Re: First draft of PG 17 release notes

On Tue, May 21, 2024 at 1:51 PM Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>
> On Tue, May 21, 2024 at 12:27 PM Andres Freund <andres(at)anarazel(dot)de> wrote:
> > To me that's the "General Performance" section. If somebody reading the
> > release notes doesn't care about performance, they can just skip that section
> > ([1]). I don't see why we wouldn't want to include the same level of detail
> > as for other changes.
>
> I'm relatively sure that we've had this argument in previous years and
> essentially everyone but Bruce has agreed with the idea that
> performance changes ought to be treated the same as any other kind of
> improvement. The difficulty is that Bruce is the one doing the release
> notes. I think it might help if someone were willing to prepare a
> patch showing what they think specifically should be changed. Or maybe
> Bruce would be willing to provide a list of all of the performance
> improvements he doesn't think are worth release-noting or isn't sure
> how to release-note, and someone else can then have a go at them.
>
> Personally, I suspect that a part of the problem, other than the
> inevitable fact that the person doing the work has a perspective on
> how the work should be done with which not everyone will agree, is
> that a lot of performance changes have commit messages that don't
> really explain what the user impact is. For instance, consider
> 6dbb490261a6170a3fc3e326c6983ad63e795047 ("Combine freezing and
> pruning steps in VACUUM"). It does actually say what the benefit is
> ("That reduces the overall amount of WAL generated") but the reader
> could easily be left wondering whether that is really the selling
> point. Does it also reduce CPU consumption? Is that more or less
> important than the WAL reduction? Was the WAL reduction the motivation
> for the work? Is the WAL reduction significant enough that this is a
> feature in its own right, or is this just preparatory to some other
> work? These kinds of ambiguities can exist for any commit, not just
> performance commits, but I bet that on average the problem is worse
> for performance-related commits.

In Postgres development, we break larger projects into smaller ones
and then those smaller projects into multiple individual commits. Each
commit needs to stand alone and each subproject needs to have a
defensible benefit. One thing that is harder with performance-related
work than non-performance feature work is that there isn't always a
final "turn it on" commit. For example, let's say you are adding a new
view that tracks new stats of some kind. You do a bunch of refactoring
and small subprojects to make it possible to add the view. Then the
final commit that actually creates the view has obvious user value to
whoever is reading the log. For performance features, it doesn't
always work like this.

For the vacuum WAL volume reduction, there were a bunch of smaller
projects throughout the last development year that I worked on that
were committed by different people and with different individual
benefits. Some changes caused vacuum to do less visibility checks (so
less CPU usage), some changed WAL format in a way that saves some
space, and some, like the commit you mention, make vacuum emit less
WAL. That commit by itself doesn't contain all of the user benefits of
the whole project. I couldn't think of a good place to list all of the
commits together that were part of the same project. Perhaps you could
argue that they were not in fact part of the same project and instead
were just small individual changes -- none of which are individually
worth including in the release notes.

- Melanie