Re: add timing information to pg_upgrade

On Tue, Aug 1, 2023 at 9:00 AM Nathan Bossart <nathandbossart@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> On 1 Aug 2023, at 09:45, Peter Eisentraut <peter@eisentraut.org> wrote:
> >> But who would use that, other than, you know, you, right now?

/me raises hand

Or at least, me back when I was hacking on pg_upgrade performance.
This, or something like it, would have been fantastic.

> >> I think the pg_upgrade output is already too full with not-really-actionable information (like most of the above "Checking ..." are not really interesting for a regular user).
>
> Perhaps.  But IMO it's nice to know that it's doing things and making
> progress, even if you don't understand exactly what it's doing all the
> time.

+1. One of our findings at $prevjob was that some users *really* want
some indication, anything at all, that things are progressing and
aren't stuck. There was a lot of anxiety around upgrades.

(There are probably _better_ ways to indicate progress than the
current step divisions... But even poor progress indicators seemed to
lower blood pressures, IIRC.)

> That being said, I wouldn't be opposed to hiding some of this output
> behind a --verbose or --debug option or consolidating some of the steps
> into fewer status messages.

I agree that millisecond-level timing should probably be opt-in.

--Jacob