Why PostgreSQL major version upgrades are hard

Let’s stipulate that PostgreSQL has grown significantly in popularity over the last 20 years. I don’t know by how much, but certainly at least one order of magnitude, probably two or more.

I wrote recently about the performance of PostgreSQL when compiled with different compilers and optimization levels. Another dimension in that evaluation is link-time optimization (LTO).

When the PostgreSQL project makes a release, the primary artifact of that is the publication of a source code tarball. That represents the output of all the work that went into the creation of the PostgreSQL software up to the point of the release. The source tarball is then used downstream by packagers to make binary packages (or file system...

I have tested several times which compiler builds PostgreSQL the fastest. Now let’s look at with which compiler PostgreSQL runs the fastest.

PGConf.dev 2024 is over. What happened while no one was watching the source code?