Benchmarking Postgres 17 vs. 18 (opens in new tab)

It is. I tried to repro it without success.

I wonder if it's just being executed on a different VMs with slightly different performance characteristics. I can't tell based on the formulation in the post whether all the runs for one test are executed on the same VM or not.

Yes, it’s the ephemerality that’s the biggest issue. Enterprise-grade SSDs are quite reliable, and typically have PLP so even in the event of a sudden power loss, any queued writes that the drive has accepted - and thus ack’d the fsync() - will be written. Presumably you’d be running some kind of redundancy, likely some flavor of RAID or zRAID (assuming purely local storage here, not a distributed system like Ceph, nor synchronous replication).

But in the cloud, if the physical server backing your instance dies, or even if someone accidentally issues a shutdown command, you don’t get that same drive back when the new instance comes up. So a problem that is normally solved by basic local redundancy suddenly becomes impossible, and thus you must either run synchronous or semi-sync replication (the latter is what PlanetScale Metal does), accepting the latency hit from distributed storage, or asynchronous replication and accept some amount of data loss, which is rarely acceptable.

Databases like Postgres have well established ways to handle that. And if you're setting up the DB yourself, you absolutely need to do backups anyway. And a replica on a different server.

On some providers (e.g. Hetzner), the dedicated servers come by default with 2x RAID 1 disks, so it's a lot less likely to fail (unless the datacenter burns down).

Yes, a single disk in a VPS or cloud provider has durability concerns. That's why EBS and products like it that pretend to be a single disk are actually several. Instead of relying on multiple block devices, though, we create that redundancy at a higher level by relying on multiple MySQL or Postgres servers for durability, each with a local NVMe drive for performance.

Sure. Till an extent. And if you run some mission-critical application, definitely.

But most applications run fine from local storage and can tolerate some downtime. They might even benefit from the improved performance. You can also fix the durability and disaster recovery concerns by setting up on RAID/ZFS and maintaining proper backups.

yeh planetscale loves to flex how fast they are but the main reason they are fast is because they run a full abstraction less than any other cloud provider and this does in fact have trade-offs.

Using a single disk has durability concerns. But I don't see why VPS vs dedicated server should matter much.

RAID isn't the answer, either, for the record. In AWS and GCP, the CPU or RAM blowing up will cost you access to that local NVMe drive, too, no matter how much RAID you throw at it.

we have mitigated the durability concerns in multiple ways.

If you want your own hardware to be OPEX, just do leasing. Every enterprise hardware seller will make you an offer for that.

> You pay for it because you want backups and replication to be somebody else's problem.

Or you just use something like CockroachDB, YugabyteDB etc that auto replicate, auto rebalance if a node goes down, and have build in support for backups to and from S3...

Or if your a bit more hands on, multigress seems to be closing to completion ( https://github.com/multigres/multigres ) from the guy that make Vitess for Mysql.

The idea that managing hardware and software is hard, is silly yet, people (mostly managers it seems ) think its the best solution.

oh no! this is proven to be impossible, no man can tell a computer what to do

lspci is only written in the old alchemy books, in the whispers of the thrice great Hermes.

PS: I have personally put down actual fires in a datacenter, and I prefer it to this 3000 IOPS crap.

Working at IT places in the late 2000s, it was still pretty common place for there to be a server rooms. Even for a large org with multiple sites 100s of kms a part, you could manage it with a pretty small team. And it is a lot easier to build resilient applications now than it was back then from what I remember.

Cloud costs are getting large enough that I know I’ve got one foot out the door and a long term plan to move back to having our own servers and spend the money we save on people. I can only see cloud getting even more expensive, not less.

You don't need to, just rent dedicated servers, still 20-50x cheaper, problem solved.

This is the 500$ per month option they are describing in the post, the magnificent 300,000 IOPS, the network disk is 1500$ for 16000 IOPS

not to mention then you have all the issues people are discussing managing your own backups, snapshots and replication and etc

Ah my mistake, I linked to the docs for `pg_dump` (which has long had the `format` option) rather than `pg_dumpall` (which lacks it).

Before Postgres 18 was released, the docs listed `format` as an option for `pg_dumpall` in the upcoming version 18 (e.g. Wayback Machine from Jun 2025 https://web.archive.org/web/20250624230110/https://www.postg... ). The relevant commit is from Apr 2025 (see link #0 in my original comment). But now all mention has been scrubbed, even from the Devel branch docs.

Yes, as in timescaledb. Sorry for not be specific.