Also, given the heavy UPDATE nature of the pgbench test, a non 100% default fill factor on some tables would make sense.
FWIW, sometime back I have seen that with fill factor 80, at somewhat moderate client counts (32) on 192 - Hyper Threaded m/c, the performance is 20~30% better, but at higher client counts, it was same as 100 fill factor.
The 20-30% figure is consistent with figures I collected 2 years ago about fill factor on HDD, see the beginning run of:
Although I found that the advantages is reduced after some time because once a page has got an update it has some free space which can be taken advantage of later on, if the space was not reclaimed by vacuum.
I cannot understand why there would be no advantage with more clients, though...
Alas, performance testing is quite sensitive to many details:-(
The current status of the patch and recent mail thread discussion doesn't
represent the same.
Closed in 2016-11 commitfest with "returned with feedback" status.
Please feel free to update the status once you submit the updated patch.