I don't disagree, I feel like we might be using it wrong. We were trying to replace ES with it but it just doesn't feel like it fits our needed usecase.
You don’t need a cluster nor should you be having any issues you mentioned. I run 10x that volume daily on a single gcp box (8 core / 64GB). We migrated off BigQuery and went from $10k/mo to about $250/mo. And it’s faster for both low-latency and big slow queries.
The plan is to 10x that volume in the not too distant future but given what you've said I can believe we are horribly over-provisioned/over-scaled. Thank you!
It sounds like you’re probably using Clickhouse Cloud? If so, I was not impressed. Overly pushy sales people, pricing isn’t competitive, and they’re trying to cater to the snowflake/databricks crowd without smoothing any rough edges (like the default timeout being enabled on a GUI).
Overall I’d say CH isn’t as tolerant or forgiving as BigQuery, Snowflake, or Databricks. You can write the worst SQL possible and BQ will happily charge you $5/TB for that cartesian self-join. CH meanwhile will error with memory limit or even crash.
We are using Altinity. I believe it's a 3-server cluster and we have 2 clusters (our prod one and another one we are trying to promote to production once our data integrity checks pass, at which point we will spin the other down).