DATABASES Signal 625 2 feeds carried it
PostgreSQL development activity shows slow and consistent growth in commits and mailing list volume
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Tomas Vondra analyzed project data from the late 1990s to today, noting an increase in weekly commits and mailing list traffic.
The growth in communication volume has made it nearly impossible for developers to follow all discussions in detail. This increases the reliance on clear thread subjects for filtering relevant technical work.
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Weekly commits have grown from approximately 25 in 2010 to about 50 currently.
Daily mailing list messages increased from roughly 25 to about 100, with peaks of 200 in March.
The fraction of messages containing attachments, likely patches, rose from 5% before 2008 to 25%.
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What the cluster adds up to.
The project has seen a steady rise in both code contributions and communication. Weekly commit volume has roughly doubled since 2010. Mailing list activity has also scaled, with daily message counts increasing fourfold since the archives began in 1998.
Communication patterns have shifted toward larger and more frequent attachments. Total daily message size grew from 100kB to 200kB around 2009, then climbed to approximately 2MB per day after 2016. These shifts align with the introduction of commitfests in 2008 and the deployment of a commitfest app in 2015.
The complexity of contributions is reflected in patch structures. While most patches consist of a single part, there is a trend toward splitting complex changes into multiple pieces. Average parts per patch reached 1.6, with some extreme cases reaching 76 parts.
The primary cost of this growth is the cognitive load on contributors. The volume of discussion now exceeds the capacity of individual developers to track every detail. This necessitates stricter discipline in how threads are labeled to maintain productivity.
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