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Unlimited in this context just means you're going to be CPU limited before you hit limits on IOPS. It'd be technically not possible to be bottlenecked on IOPS.

That might not be 100% true, but I've never seen a RDBMS be able to saturate IOPS on a local NVMe. It's some quite specialized software to leverage every ounce of IOPS without being CPU bottlenecked first. Postgres and MySQL are not it.

discuss

ndriscoll|5 months ago

What does "local NVMe" mean for you? AFAIK in AWS if you have a 2 core VM you're getting ~3% of a single disk worth of IOPS for their attached storage. Technically NVMe. Not generally what people think when a laptop can do 50x more IO. The minipc I mentioned has 4x the core count and... well who knows how much more IO capacity, but it seems like it should be able to trounce both. Obviously an even more interesting comparison would be... a real server. Why is a database company running benchmarks on something comparable to my low-end phone?

Anyway, saying unlimited is absurd. If you think it's more than you need, say how much it is and say that's more than you need. If you have infinite IOPS why not do the benchmark on a dataset that fits in CPU cache?

mattrobenolt|5 months ago

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ssd-inst...

Not all AWS instance types support NVMe drives. It's not the same as normal attached storage.

I'm not really sure your arguments are in good faith here tho.

This is just not a configuration you can trivially do while maintaining durability and HA.

There's a lot of hype going the exact opposite direction and more separation of storage and compute. This is our counter to that. We think even EBS is bad.

This isn't a setup that is naturally just going to beat a "real server" that also has local NVMes or whatever you'd do yourself. This is just not what things like RDS or Aurora do, etc. Most things rely on EBS which is significantly worse than local storages. We aren't really claiming we've invented something new here. It's just unique in the managed database space.

parthdesai|5 months ago

They literally state this on their metal offering

> Unlimited I/O — Metal's local NVMe drives offer higher I/O bandwidth than network-attached storage. You will run out of CPU long before you use all your I/O bandwidth.

https://planetscale.com/metal#benefits-of-metal