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by hedora 237 days ago
Thanks for the summary.

Note that those numbers are terrible vs. a physical disk, especially latency, which should be < 1ms read, << 1ms write.

(That assumes async replication of the write ahead log to a secondary. Otherwise, write latency should be ~ 1 rtt, which is still << 5ms.)

Stacking storage like this isn’t great, but PG wasn’t really designed for performance or HA. (I don’t have a better concrete solution for ansi SQL that works today.)

2 comments

A few datapoints that might help frame this:

- EBS typically operates in the millisecond range. AWS' own documentation suggests "several milliseconds"; our own experience with EBS is 1-2 ms. Reads/writes to local disk alone are certainly faster, but it's more meaningful to compare this against other forms of network-attached storage.

- If durability matters, async replication isn't really the right baseline for local disk setups. Most production deployments of Postgres/databases rely on synchronous replication -- or "semi-sync," which still waits for at least one or a subset of acknowledgments before committing -- which in the cloud lands you in the single-digit millisecond range for writes again.

(I'm on the team that made this)

The raw numbers are one thing, but the overall performance of pg is another. If you check out https://planetscale.com/blog/benchmarking-postgres-17-vs-18 for example, in the average QPS chart, you can see that there isn't a very large difference in QPS between GP3 at 10k iops and NVMe at 300k iops.

So currently I wouldn't recommend this new storage for the highest end workloads, but it's also a beta project that's still got a lot of room for growth! I'm very enthusiastic about how far we can take this!

it's a 70% difference at lower cost. i know math is hard but c'mon try and be serious.