[jandrewrogers]

I/O parallelism is necessary but far from sufficient. My own designs arbitrarily allow 64 reads and 64 writes to be in-flight concurrently per core. There is no science behind that limit beyond the fact it has worked brilliantly for many years across every type of storage. But I/O parallelism won't fix terrible scheduling.

A fast storage engine needs to eliminate most of the elements that will stall an execution pipeline. This means doing things like almost completely eliminating shared data structures and context switching. It also means designing your own execution and I/O scheduler to greatly reduce the various forms of stalling on memory ubiquitous in many designs. It is difficult to overstate the extent to which thoughtful schedule design can greatly improve throughput.

A state-of-the-art storage engine can drive 2+ GB/s per core, and schedule things to keep the storage hardware performance close to theoretical while smoothing out transients. It is very easy to run out of storage bandwidth in my experience.

[ccleve]

I'd love to learn more. I'm in need of a fast engine.

What proprietary engines do you know of that I can look at?

Do you have more details on your own designs? Anything you can share?

[ddorian43]

See scylladb. They're doing most of the grandparent is talking about (per-core sharding, async everything, disk/io/network scheduler, dpdk, custom filesystem etc).