crcastleAWS engineer reports PostgreSQL perf halved by Linux 7.0, fix may not be easy
https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/yr3inlzesdb45n6i6lpbimwr7b25kqk...
Nobody sensible runs the latest kernel; nobody running PG in production should be afraid of setting a non-default at either boot time or as a sysctl. So this will, most likely, be another step in building a PG database server (turn off pre-emption if your kernel is 7.0 or later and PG is pre-whatever-version).
At worst it might become a permanent part of building a PG server and a FAQ... but if it affects one thing this badly, it will affect others.
That may be the case, but it’s still not a great situation to be in and one has to wonder: if PostgreSQL is affected, what else is?
That's the big thing - PSQL will be tested, noticed, and fixed (and likely have a version that handles 7.0 by the time it's in common use).
But other software won't and may not even be noticed, except as a (I hate using the term) enshittification.
Better to introduce the "correct way" in 7.0 but not regress the old (translate the "correct" into the old if necessary) - and then in 8.0 or some future release implement the regression.
Exactly, this is how it’s usually done. As the developer on the mailing list mentions, implementing a new low level construct in 7.0 and a performance regression that requires said new low level construct to mitigate is not great. You need a grace period in which both old and new approach is fast.
> Nobody sensible runs the latest kernel
From the article: "Linux 7.0 stable is due out in about two weeks. This is also the kernel version powering Ubuntu 26.04 LTS to be released later in April."
Unfortunately, lots of people will be running it in less than a month. At the moment, it'll take a kernel patch (not a sysctl) to undo this-- hopefully something changes.
Not nobody but not everybody upgrades to the newest distros immediately. That's the advantage of LTS. I've even found that a lot of programs have poorer support on 24.04 than 22.04 due to security changes, so I'm fine sticking with 22.04 as my main dev system.
This seems to be brushing off a major performance regression just because you personally don’t upgrade for 4 years. I don’t think that’s common at all.
> ... not everybody upgrades to the newest distros immediately.
While that's true, for new deployments the story is often "deploy on the latest release of things available at the time".
So, there will probably be a substantial deployment of new projects / testing projects using the Linux 7.0 kernel along with the latest available software packages in a few weeks.
22.04 is also an LTS release, supported for another year still.
https://ubuntu.com/about/release-cycle
We're just now looking at moving production machines to 24.04.
Depends on your shop.
As someone with a heavy QA/Dev Opps background I don't think we have enough details.
Is it only ARM64 ? How many ARM64 PG DBs are running 96 cores?
However...
This is the most popular database in the world. Odds are this will effect a bunch of other lesser known applications.
If you're running in a docker container you share the host kernel. You might not have a choice.