On Sat, 8 May 2021 at 19:03, Yura Sokolov <y.sokolov@postgrespro.ru> wrote: > Perhaps there is need for flag "heavy asserts". Or option "--enable-cassert=heavy". Then USE_ASSERT_CHECKING could be defined to integer 1 or 2 depending on "heaviness" of enabled checks.
I'd rather explore all other options before we went and did something like that. The reason I feel this way is; a couple of jobs ago, I worked on a project that had quite a large test suite. In order to run the tests on a typical dev machine took about 16 hours. When writing new tests, nobody really ever gave much thought to how long tests would take to run. The time it took had already grown to something much longer than was practical to run before a commit. Instead, we had a test farm. We'd commit to master (yuck) and the test farm would run the tests. Unfortunately, the farm was not big enough to run every test on every commit, so if it encountered a test failure (as it commonly did) it tried to bisect and find the first breaking commit for that test then alert the person (probably the next day). bisecting works out pretty badly when someone commits a build breaking commit.
Now that I work on PostgreSQL, I very much like the fact that I can run make check-world -j and see very quickly that no tests fail. I'd rather not have something like heavy asserts as I believe it would just become a dumping ground for badly thought through Asserts that most likely could be done in some better way that didn't require so much effort. (I'll put mine in that category) It might not take long before most committers opted to run make check-world without the heavy asserts because it became just too slow. When that happens, it means the buildfarm is left to catch these errors and most likely the feedback will take much longer to get back to the committer due to the animals running these flags also having to churn through the slow tests.
So, I'm -1 for "heavy asserts".
Personally, I have not problem with too slow assertions, although it is not too practical. The main problem is some shock, and feeling so some is wrong. I spent 1 hour detecting if it is a bug or not.
Can it be possible to identify this situation?
Maybe use some specific name of this routine - like
assert_only_check_xxxx
Then I can see this warning in perf, and I don't need to do other or deeper checks
