best practices for removing a cluster setting

[Andrei Matei]

Peeps,

Does anyone know if there's precedent or policy for removing a cluster setting?
I'm unsure about whether I should technically keep the now-unused setting so as to not break scripts that set it, or not. Keeping it has the side-effect that documentation for it is automatically generated.

In particular, I'm removing server.heap_profile.system_memory_threshold_fraction, since I'm moving to a different policy around collecting heap profiles - instead of being based on an RSS threshold, I want to try one driven by high-water marks of allocations (not a threshold), and one that only considers Go memory use, ignoring CGo (and OS-level RSS).

- a_m

[Ben Darnell]

Yes, there is precedent, and a process for making sure old names don't accidentally get reused while they might have old persisted values:

https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/blob/fbb743d20f8168811fe9f4e326a1be62440fcf98/pkg/settings/doc.go#L54-L65