Benchmarking Postgres Write Scalability for Durable Workflow Execution
By
KraftyOne
1mo ago· 6 min readenInsight
100/100
Golden Brown
Bagelometer↗
Slow-proofed and worth the wait. Worth its weight in flour.
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Summary
This article benchmarks the scalability of a single Postgres server for durable workflow execution systems. It focuses on measuring Postgres write performance, which is the bottleneck in workflow execution due to the need to checkpoint inputs, outcomes, and step results. The article addresses the common question of whether Postgres scales by providing practical performance data rather than just theoretical assertions.
Key quotes
· 3 pulledWhen building a durable workflow execution system on Postgres, one of the most common questions we get is 'does Postgres scale?'
There are plenty of posts from top tech teams asserting that Postgres does scale, but not all show how its performance scales in practice.
We focus on the performance of Postgres writes as those are the bottleneck in workflow execution: a durable workflow has to write to the database multiple times to checkpoint its inputs, its outcome, and the outcome of each of its steps.
Benchmarking the workflow execution and workflow queueing scalability of a single Postgres server.
