Postgres isn't slow, your storage is
A technical analysis of PostgreSQL performance suggests that storage bottlenecks, rather than database software limitations, are often the cause of slow ingestion and latency. The article advocates for using local NVMe storage to improve throughput at scale.
Why it matters
Optimizing database storage architecture is critical for engineering teams managing large-scale data workloads to ensure system reliability and performance.
At POSETTE 2026 , Sai Srirampur presented "Postgres Isn’t Slow. Your Storage Is." a talk examining how storage affects PostgreSQL performance at scale. This post recaps the benchmark, what the results revealed, and the architecture proposed for running PostgreSQL on local NVMe in production. You can watch the full talk in the video linked below.
The talk starts with several symptoms teams running Postgres at scale may recognize: ingestion slows down, P95 read latency becomes unpredictable, autovacuum falls behind, checkpoints compete with your actual workload for resources, or logical replication accumulates lag. These problems do not always share the same cause, but they can have a common one that is easy to overlook: storage performance.
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