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Re:Rethinking PostgreSQL Storage by ozgune on Monday June 02, 2025 @03:55AM (#44156586)
Question to author.

Are you planning to publish CH benchmarks (TPC-C and TPC-H combined)? I'd expect Aurora to perform much worse on CH than on TPC-C/H. That's because Aurora pushes the WAL logs to replicated shared storage. Since you only need quorum on a write, you get a fast ack on the write (TPC-C). The way you've run TPC-H doesn't modify the data that much, so you also get baseline Postgres performance.

However, when you're pushing writes and you have a sequential scan over the data, then Aurora needs to reconcile the WAL writes, manage locks, etc. CH benchmark exercises that path and I'd expect it to notably slow down Aurora.

(Disclaimer: ex-Citus and current Ubicloud founder)

Re:Rethinking PostgreSQL Storage by pwmtr on Monday June 02, 2025 @04:04AM (#44156616)
Yes, that is correct. As you noted, Aurora performs quite well on TPC-C due to its quorum-based write acknowledgment and on TPC-H when data modifications are minimal. However, CH workloads introduce contention, write amplification, and read/write reconciliation under analytical scan pressure, which is a difficult use-case for Aurora to handle.

That said, in our tests we only saw 2x improvements in CH benchmarks. However, we found out that it was due to an architectural issue in our VM I/O path and how we virtualize the storage. Based on our estimations we should see ~5x difference but for that we need to revamp our storage virtualization first.

We have plans for publishing a CH benchmark results on a follow up blog post. However, we didn't want to do that for now to not put misleading results.