Re: TRACE_SORT defined by default

Peter Geoghegan <pg(at)bowt(dot)ie> writes:
> On Wed, Apr 24, 2019 at 2:15 PM Joe Conway <mail(at)joeconway(dot)com> wrote:
>> Has anyone ever (or recently) measured the impact on performance to have
>> this enabled? Is it that generically useful for debugging of production
>> instances of Postgres that we really want it always enabled despite the
>> performance impact?

> It is disabled by default, in the sense that the trace_sort GUC
> defaults to off. I believe that the overhead of building in the
> instrumentation without enabling it is indistinguishable from zero.

It would probably be useful to actually prove that rather than just
assuming it. I do see some code under the symbol that is executed
even when !trace_sort, and in any case Andres keeps complaining that
even always-taken branches are expensive ...

> In
> any case the current status quo is that it's built by default. I have
> used it in production, though not very often. It's easy to turn it on
> and off.

Would any non-wizard really have a use for it?

It seems like we should either make this really a developer option
(and hence not enabled by default) or else move it into some other
category than DEVELOPER_OPTIONS.

regards, tom lane