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by Rapzid 698 days ago
I wonder how much index creation degrades if the storage were 4th gen NVMe drives vs other other, more typical storage technologies.
2 comments

Author of Ubicloud's managed Postgres service is here. I'm not sure if you refer to SATA SSDs or typical cloud database setups when you said "other, more typical storage technologies". I'll share my perspective on both.

If you compare NVMe SSDs and SATA SSDs, NVMe SSDs are order of magnitude faster. Maximum theoretical limit of SATA III bus is ~6Gbit/s. This number is 32Gbit/s for Gen 3 NVMe, 64Gbit/s for Gen 4 NVMe and 128Gbit/s for Gen5 NVMe.

For typical database setups offered by cloud providers, the situation is different though. Most of the time, network attached storage devices are used in those setups such as EBS on AWS or Premium SSDs on Azure. These setups suffer a lot due to additional network hop. They are also subject to throughput limits (which can be increased in some cases by paying significantly more). No matter what type of SSDs are used at the backend, additional network hop significantly slows down the reads and writes.

At Ubicloud, we use local NVMe SSDs, which is why we are able to achieve high read/write performances. However, as ngalstyan4 suggested, benchmarking is required to make more definitive claims.

Author here. We will benchmark this thoroughly in the future for our vector indexes.

But at least anecdotally, it made a ton of difference.

We met <200ms latency budget with Ubicloud NVMes but had to wait seconds to get an answer from the same query with GCP persistent disks or local SSDs