Don't Take Me Too Seriously

My recent blog post showing linear read-scaling out to 64 cores has generated a lot of attention, which I frankly did not expect.  To be sure, it's a cool result, but keep in mind that it's testing a certain very specific workload: very short transactions running very simple queries to do repeated primary key lookups on a single table.  This, of course, is not an unimportant workload; in fact, you could argue that some of the NoSQL products on the market are basically purpose-built databases for exactly this kind of workload (sometimes coupled with a facility for durable or non-durable writes).

On the flip side, it's also not the only workload.  The reason why PostgreSQL 9.2devel so completely stomps the performance of earlier releases on this test is that the transactions are very, very short.  If you ran the same test, but with BEGIN before the first query and END after the last one, or if you striped the queries across multiple tables, you would eliminate the lock manager contention that holds performance on PostgreSQL 9.1 in check on this test.

For most people, therefore, there's probably no reason to panic just because you're running one of the existing releases.  You may get better performance on PostgreSQL 9.2, when it's released, but chances are that if you had the sort of workload for which these changes make a truly dramatic difference, you wouldn't have picked PostgreSQL in the first place.  What I think is exciting about these changes is not so much that existing users will see huge performance benefits (although some will; we have a lot of good changes in this release) but that PostgreSQL will become usable in environments where it currently can't compete.

Of course, that's not to say that we're going to put memcached out of business.  There will probably always be cheaper alternatives to an RDBMS if the only work you need to do is primary key lookups and stores, and especially if you don't need durability.  But many people need good performance on large numbers of simple queries and additionally need the ability to do some more complex processing, and I'm hopeful that these scalability changes will make it much simpler to deploy PostgreSQL effectively in such environments.

Although for most people there's no huge rush to upgrade, if you're running PostgreSQL 8.3.x or older, it's time to think hard about getting onto a newer version.  Community support for PostgreSQL 8.3.x will end in Q1 of next year.  If you're running anything older than that, it's already unsupported; moreover, every release from 7.4 through 8.3 featured major performance improvements.