2026 PostgreSQL Performance Benchmark Report

Summary: This report presents comprehensive sysbench OLTP benchmark results for the latest PostgreSQL 18.6 release. Tests span 3 buffer pool tiers (2GB, 12GB, 32GB) and 6 concurrency levels (4 to 256 threads).

Table of Contents

Test Environment & Infrastructure

Hardware & Host Configuration

Hardware configuration of the host:

Software Configuration:

Buffer Pool Tiers

With the database size of 24G, three InnoDB buffer pool sizes were tested, each representing a distinct workload characteristic:

Additionally, the WAL log space was adjusted according to the actual shared_buffers size. This ensures that checkpoints consistently trigger at fixed time intervals.

Database Configuration

The schema contains 20 tables with 5M rows in each one adding up to 100M rows.

The size of the database files on the disk is 24G.

A common configuration was applied to all engines to ensure fairness. The buffer pool specifications were layered on top

Test Steps

Create the test database “bench”:

createdb bench

Use the sysbench command to load test data into the “bench” database:

sysbench oltp_read_write \
--tables=20 \
--table_size=5000000 \
--pgsql-user=postgres \
--pgsql-db=bench \
prepare

After loading the test data, vacuum the “bench” database:

vacuumdb bench

Run the performance benchmark test:

sysbench oltp_read_write \
--pgsql-user=postgres \
--pgsql-db=bench \
--tables=20 \
--table_size=5000000 \
--threads=128 \
--time=600 \
--report-interval=10 \
run

Note: The first run is a warmup phase and is not recorded as formal test result data.

Test Results

The TPS (Transactions Per Second) metrics collected below represent the number of transactions processed by the database per second. In the Sysbench read-write testing model, a single transaction contains 20 query statements, so the Queries Per Second (QPS) processed by the database is approximately 20 times the TPS.

Scenario 1: In-Memory

Instance Type: c9.8xlarge.4 (32vCPU 128GB)

Database Parameter Configuration:

shared_buffers = 32GB
max_wal_size = 32GB
min_wal_size = 4GB

Scenario 2: Mixed

Instance Type: c9.4xlarge.4 (16vCPU 64GB)

Database Parameter Configuration:

shared_buffers = 12GB
max_wal_size = 12GB
min_wal_size = 2GB

Scenario 3: I/O Bound

Instance Type: c9.4xlarge.4 (16vCPU 64GB)

Database Parameter Configuration:

shared_buffers = 2GB
max_wal_size = 2GB
min_wal_size = 256MB

References

Percona: 2026 MySQL Ecosystem Performance Benchmark Report