Build Profiles

RisingWave uses Cargo profiles to manage build settings. To briefly introduce Cargo profiles, here is a snippet from the Cargo References:

Profiles provide a way to alter the compiler settings, influencing things like optimizations and debugging symbols.

Cargo has 4 built-in profiles: dev, release, test, and bench. The profile is automatically chosen based on which command is being run if a profile is not specified on the command-line. In addition to the built-in profiles, custom user-defined profiles can also be specified.

All profiles talked in this document are defined in the Cargo.toml file of the root directory of the project. Please always refer to it for the most up-to-date information.

Built-in Profiles

RisingWave tweaks some settings of the built-in profiles to better fit its needs, in the sections of [profile.<built-in-profile>] in Cargo.toml. For example,

• dev: for local development and testing

  • completely disables LTO to speed up the build time

• release: for local testing with near-production performance

  • completely disables LTO to speed up the build time
  • embeds full debug information to help with debugging in production

Custom Profiles

RisingWave also defines some custom profiles that inherit from the built-in profiles, in the sections of [profile.<custom-profile>] in Cargo.toml. For example,

• production: for distribution and production deployment

  • inherits from release
  • enables aggressive code optimizations (like LTO) for maximum performance, at the cost of significantly increased build time

• ci-dev: for pull-request pipelines in CI

  • inherits from dev
  • tweaks some settings to reduce the build time and binary size
  • enables code optimizations for 3rd-party dependencies to improve CI performance

• ci-release: for main and main-cron pipelines in CI

  • inherits from release
  • tweaks some settings to reduce the build time and binary size
  • enables more runtime checks (like debug assertions and overflow checks) to catch potential bugs

• ci-sim: for madsim simulation tests in CI

  • similar to ci-dev
  • enables slight code optimizations for all crates to improve CI performance under single-threaded madsim execution

Comparisons

To give a better idea of the differences between the profiles, here is a matrix comparing the profiles:

Profile	Debug Info	cfg(debug_assertions)	Performance	Build Time
dev	Full	true	Bad	Fastest
release	Full	false	Good	Slow
production	Full	false	Best	Slowest
ci-dev	Backtrace only	true	Medium	Fast
ci-release	Backtrace only	true	Good	Slow
ci-sim	Backtrace only	true	Medium	Medium

Some miscellaneous notes:

• Compared to "Backtrace only", "Full" debug information additionally includes the capability to attach a debugger at runtime or on core dumps, to inspect variables and stack traces.
• There are also other subtle differences like incremental compilation settings, overflow checks, and more. They are not listed here for brevity.
• cfg(debug_assertions) can be roughly used to determine whether it's a production environment or not. Note that even though ci-release contains release in its name, the debug_assertions are still enabled.

Choose a Profile

By default, RisingWave (and RiseDev) uses the dev profile for local development and testing. To use release profile instead, you can set the corresponding configuration entry by running risedev configure. Other profiles are for their specific use cases and are not meant to be used directly by developers, thus not available with RiseDev.