Re: Quality and Performance - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

From Tom Lane
Subject Re: Quality and Performance
Date
Msg-id 8610.1196189681@sss.pgh.pa.us
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: Quality and Performance  (Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@alvh.no-ip.org>)
Responses Re: Quality and Performance
List pgsql-hackers
Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@alvh.no-ip.org> writes:
> Joshua D. Drake wrote:
>> Well I think that we do take performance into account. I agree
>> that we should *never* have a regression in performance from release
>> to release, which is what I believe has inspired this thread.

> Hmm.  I have developed several features that have driven performance
> down.

Even changes that are not feature additions but intended solely to
improve performance may have corner cases where they are losses rather
than wins.  I think "*never* have a regression in performance" is not
only pie-in-the-sky but would be a bad policy to adopt, because it
would mean for instance that we couldn't intentionally optimize common
cases at the expense of uncommon ones.

However, I think everybody agrees that getting blindsided by unexpected
performance dropoffs is a bad thing.  We really need to reinstitute
the sort of daily (or near-daily) performance tracking that Mark Wong
used to be doing, and extend it to cover a wider variety of test cases
than just DBT-2.  As an example, I'll bet that this issue of operator
lookup speed would never have been visible at all in DBT-2.
        regards, tom lane


pgsql-hackers by date:

Previous
From: Alvaro Herrera
Date:
Subject: Re: Quality and Performance
Next
From: Tom Lane
Date:
Subject: PG 7.3 is five years old today