Re: First draft of PG 17 release notes

On Wed, May 15, 2024 at 11:48 PM Andres Freund <andres(at)anarazel(dot)de> wrote:
>
> 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.

The practical reason this matters to users is that they want to change
their configuration or expectations in response to performance
improvements.

And also, as Jelte mentions upthread, describing performance
improvements made each release in Postgres makes it clear that we are
consistently improving it.

> 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.

+many

- Melanie