Everyone gets faster writes: We turned off FPW's in Neon

Neon has significantly enhanced write performance, achieving up to a 5x improvement for write-heavy workloads by disabling full-page writes (FPW) in Postgres, which are redundant due to Neon's storage architecture. This architectural change separates compute and storage, enabling the offloading of tasks from Postgres compute to distributed storage, which is not possible in traditional Postgres deployments. The move, known as image generation pushdown, allows Neon's pageserver to generate full-page images based on actual changes, reducing network traffic by 94% and improving scalability and read performance. Benchmarks and real-world production tests have shown substantial improvements in transaction throughput and read latencies, with WAL generation dropping significantly. The change has been rolled out seamlessly across all Neon databases globally, marking a significant step in leveraging the flexibility and performance potential of Neon's lakebase architecture.