Robert Haas wrote:
This is drifting a bit off-topic for this thread, but it's not so easy to figure out from looking at the TODO which things are actually important. Performance-related improvements are mixed in with non-performance related improvements, which are mixed in with things that are probably not improvements at all. And even to the extent that you can identify the stuff that's performance-related, it's far from obvious which things are most important. Any thoughts on that
I don't think it's off topic at all actually, and as usually I'll be happy to argue why. Reorganizing the TODO so that it's easier for newcomers to consume is certainly a worthwhile but hard to "fund" (find time to do relative to more important things) effort itself. My point was more that statistically, *anything* on that list is likely a better candidate for something to work on usefully than one of the random theoretical performance improvements from research that pop on the lists from time to time. People get excited about these papers and blog posts sometimes, but the odds of those actually being in the critical path where it represents a solution to a current PostgreSQL bottleneck is dramatically lower than that you'll find one reading the list of *known* issues. Want to improve PostgreSQL performance? Spend more time reading the TODO, less looking around elsewhere for problems the database may or may not have.
I have a major time sink I'm due to free myself from this week, and the idea of providing some guidance for a "low hanging performance fruit" section of the TODO is a good one I should take a look at. I have a personal list of that sort already I should probably just make public, since the ideas for improving things are not the valuable part I should worry about keeping private anyway.
-- Greg Smith 2ndQuadrant US Baltimore, MD PostgreSQL Training, Services and Support greg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx www.2ndQuadrant.us -- Sent via pgsql-performance mailing list (pgsql-performance@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-performance
