Re: First draft of PG 17 release notes

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

Only you can decide what is important to you.