Postgres 18 Unleashes Asynchronous I/O, Boosting Read Performance Up to 3X
Summary
Postgres 18 introduces asynchronous I/O (AIO) for read operations, offering potential performance gains of up to 3x, especially in cloud environments with high storage latency, through options like dedicated I/O worker processes or the Linux io_uring interface.
Key Points
- Postgres 18 introduces asynchronous I/O (AIO) for read operations, offering potential performance gains, especially in cloud environments with high storage latency.
- The new io_method setting controls the AIO mechanism, with options for synchronous I/O (sync), using dedicated I/O worker processes (worker), or utilizing the Linux io_uring interface (io_uring).
- Benchmarks on AWS show up to 2-3x improvement in read performance with AIO, with io_uring delivering the best results in cold cache scenarios.