[Aachen]

Why would tuning be necessary for a regular setup, does it come with such bad defaults? Why not upstream those tunes so it can work out of the box?

I remember spending time on this as a teenager but I haven't touched my MariaDB config in a decade now probably. Ah no, one time a few years ago I turned off fsyncing temporarily to do a huge batch of insertions (helped a lot with qps, especially on the HDD I used at the time), but that's not something to leave permanently enabled so not really tuning it for production use

[zrail]

PostgreSQL defaults (last I looked, it's been a few years) are/were set up for spinning storage and very little memory. They absolutely work for tiny things like what self-hosting usually implies, but for production workloads tuning the db parameters to match your hardware is essential.

[nijave]

Correct, they're designed for maximum compatibility. Postgres doesn't even do basic adjustments out of the box and defaults are designed to work on tiny machines.

Iirc default shared_mem is 128MB and it's usually recommended to set to 50-75% system RAM.