[tyingq]

" small transactions modifying a single row could take as much as 7-8 seconds"

That's surprising. I wasn't expecting CockroachDB to be really fast, given the constraints they work within. But that sounds more like a bug or config error. Unless perhaps you mean a really high number of processes trying to update the same row at the same time? Like a global counter or something?

[lobster_johnson]

Indeed, the stress test updates just one row, which mirrors certain write patterns in our application. I just started this testing, so we'll see what happens when I extend it to more than one row.