On Tue, May 21, 2024 at 12:27 PM Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.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.
--
Robert Haas
EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com