Pushing PostgreSQL to the Limit: How to Benchmark Hardware with Postgres
Thursday, October 01 · 14:30–15:20
Hardware vendors and cloud providers often tout massive IOPS and throughput capabilities, leaving DBAs wondering if the CPU, the storage, or PostgreSQL itself is the actual bottleneck during intense workloads. Whether you are validating new NVMe arrays, comparing cloud block storage options, or sizing instances for an upcoming migration, guessing is a dangerous game.
Attendees will learn how to build an impartial benchmarking harness tailored for Postgres. We will cover crucial, often-missed PostgreSQL gotchas—from navigating archive_mode overhead and autovacuum interference, to taming checkpoint storms that skew synthetic tests. You'll leave knowing how to correctly instrument system and database metrics to definitively prove whether a performance plateau is caused by storage limits, CPU bandwidth, or internal PostgreSQL lock contention.
