Performance archaeology: OLTP - Tomas Vondra

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2024-11-27 18:30:04

The Postgres open source project is nearly 30 years old, I personally started using it about 20 years ago. And I’ve been contributing code for at least 10 years. But even with all that experience I find it really difficult to make judgments about how the performance changed over the years. Did it improve? And by how much? I decided to do some benchmarks to answer this question.

The main reason why answering such questions is hard is we don’t have good data for comparing this many Postgres release. So I decided to get the data myself. I ran a lot of benchmarks releases since Postgres 8.0, with configuration that I think was “reasonably fair” for all versions. And I presented the results at pgconf.eu 2024, with some nice charts showing how the performance changed. There’s a recording of the talk, and the slides, if you’re interested.

Note: There are many other interesting talks from the same event, and also from the previous year. I very much recommend visiting the PGEU channel. There’s also the channel for the PostgreSQL Developer Conference.