Ben Dicken, PlanetScale
Postgres evolves quickly. Each major version brings new performance improvements. The best recent example is the new io_method feature introduced in version 18, allowing database engineers to choose between sync, worker, and io_uring to control the behavior of I/O handling. These and many others have a huge impact on performance, which in turn impacts reliability.
This talk will cover the performance enhancements that have come to Postgres over the past few major versions, including detailed benchmarks and recommendations to settings to use for different types of workloads.
Ben Dicken spends his days researching, benchmarking, and writing about all things databases and distributed systems. He's currently in developer education at PlanetScale, and was formerly both a computer science faculty member and a research software engineer at a small database company.
author = {Ben Dicken},
title = {The Evolution of Postgres Performance},
year = {2026},
address = {Seattle, WA},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = mar
}
