Summary

Preliminary benchmark results for DRIVERS-719 in Python and Ruby show that there is a very significant performance degradation when OTel is enabled, anywhere from ~15-50%.

Motivation

Who is the affected end user?

Any user that enables OpenTelemetry in the driver.

How does this affect the end user?

Large performance regressions across workloads.

How likely is it that this problem or use case will occur?

Very likely. Simply enabling OTel will heavily impact application performance.

If the problem does occur, what are the consequences and how severe are they?

Severe. Very large performance impacts.

Is this issue urgent?

Blocker for DRIVERS-719.

Is this ticket required by a downstream team?

No.

Is this ticket only for tests?

No.

Acceptance Criteria

• Enabling OpenTelemetry MUST not degrade performance excessively (threshold of excessive impact TBD)
• Documentation MUST include best practices for using OpenTelemetry efficiently
• All drivers implementing DRIVERS-719 MUST compare the performance of their driver benchmarking suite with and without OpenTelemetry enabled, across a range of representative sampling rates and other performance configurations.