Re: First draft of PG 17 release notes

On Tue, May 21, 2024 at 01:50:58PM -0400, Robert Haas 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.

Well, developers do ask why their individual commits were not listed,
and I repeat the same thing, as I have done in this thread multiple
times. You can probably look over this thread to find them, or in
previous years.

To be clear, it is performance improvements that don't have user-visible
changes or enable new workloads that I skip listing. I will also note
that don't remember any user ever finding a performance boost, and then
coming to use and asking why we didn't list it --- this release note
review process seems to add all of those.

Maybe adding a section called "Internal Performance". Here is our
General Performance contents:

E.1.3.1.3. General Performance

Allow vacuum to more efficiently remove and freeze tuples (Melanie
Plageman)

WAL traffic caused by vacuum is also more compact.

Allow vacuum to more efficiently store tuple references (Masahiko
Sawada, John Naylor)

Additionally, vacuum is no longer silently limited to one gigabyte
of memory when maintenance_work_mem or autovacuum_work_mem are higher.

Optimize vacuuming of relations with no indexes (Melanie Plageman)

Increase default vacuum_buffer_usage_limit to 2MB (Thomas Munro)

Improve performance when checking roles with many memberships
(Nathan Bossart)

Improve performance of heavily-contended WAL writes (Bharath
Rupireddy)

Improve performance when transferring large blocks of data to a
client (Melih Mutlu)

Allow the grouping of file system reads with the new system variable
io_combine_limit (Thomas Munro, Andres Freund, Melanie Plageman, Nazir
Bilal Yavuz)

Do we think more user-invisible changes should be in there?

--
Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> https://momjian.us
EDB https://enterprisedb.com

Only you can decide what is important to you.