Insert benchmark: PostgreSQL 12, 13 and 14 on a small server

I have another performance report for the insert benchmark using PostgreSQL 12.4, 13.4 and 14.0 on a small server. As normal, I had to repeat the tests a few times: I make mistakes and sometimes need results for new tuning options. The goal for the tests is to understand how low-concurrency performance changes in new PostgreSQL releases. Low-concurrency tests are great for finding CPU regressions. High-concurrency tests are also great but I only have small servers at home.

Executive summary:

• Postgres is boring. There were no regressions.

Details

Tests were run for Postgres versions 12.4, 13.4 and 14.0. I used the same configuration file (see here). The script to build Postgres from source is here.

The test servers have 4 cores and tests were run with either 1 insert connection or 2 connections (rate limited inserts, not rate-limited queries). This page has links to explain the insert benchmark and perf report format. The test was run in CPU-bound and IO-bound modes. For each mode, X rows were inserted into a table without a secondary index, then 3 secondary indexes were created, then Y more rows were inserted. The values for X and Y were (20M, 20M) for CPU-bound and (500M, 10M) for IO-bound. After the inserts there were three insert+query steps where the insert connection was rate-limited to 100, 500 and 1000 inserts/s. Each query step was run for 2 hours.

The test server uses Ubuntu 20.04, gcc-9.3.0-17 and uname -a shows 5.4.0-89-generic. The database filesystem uses XFS with discard enabled. 

Results

I have shell scripts to generate perf reports. The reports for CPU-bound and IO-bound are here and here. From the CPU-bound (see the summary) and IO-bound results (see the summary):

• Postgres is boring. There were no regressions.