Restrict pgbench's zipfian parameter to ensure good performance.

Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>

Commit: 26a76cb64072df6fa5585c2c15df39970ccdce01
Author: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Date: 2019-04-01T21:37:34Z
Releases: 12.0
Restrict pgbench's zipfian parameter to ensure good performance.

Remove the code that supported zipfian distribution parameters less
than 1.0, as it had undocumented performance hazards, and it's not
clear that the case is useful enough to justify either fixing or
documenting those hazards.

Also, since the code path for parameter > 1.0 could perform badly
for values very close to 1.0, establish a minimum allowed value
of 1.001.  This solution seems superior to the previous vague
documentation warning about small values not performing well.

Fabien Coelho, per a gripe from Tomas Vondra

Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/b5e172e9-ad22-48a3-86a3-589afa20e8f7@2ndquadrant.com

Files

PathChange+/−
doc/src/sgml/ref/pgbench.sgml modified +11 −16
src/bin/pgbench/pgbench.c modified +19 −148
src/bin/pgbench/t/001_pgbench_with_server.pl modified +2 −29

Documentation touched

Discussion