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Re:Why Does Everyone Run Ancient Postgres Versions? by crabbone on Saturday October 19, 2024 @04:25PM (#41890515)
The idea here is more that you need to adjust these flags for the benchmark to make sense.

Take fore example the aforementioned block size. Say, you have a storage with 4x block size of the one used by PostgreSQL. If you run a benchmark over such a storage, you'll have insane write amplification. Nobody will consider results of such a "benchmark" because that's simply a misconfiguration of the program you are trying to measure.

More generally, Linux distros will tend to compile distributed binaries with "safe" defaults s.t. run on most h/w users can have, and this means optimizing for the lowest common denominator. Looping back to PostgreSQL, the default for block size was for a long time 4k, and iirc today it's 8k. This is fine, if we are talking about plain SSD / HDD, but with enterprise SDS, these are "rookie numbers", even the maximum supported by PosgreSQL (32k) is still a "rookie number", but it's still four times better than the default!

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