stackconf 2025 | How NVMe over TCP runs PostgreSQL in Quicksilver mode! by Sagy Volkov.pdf

PostgreSQL as a SQL engine can accommodate a very high-transaction rate using multithreading very efficiently, but as your data grows and the number of connections and queries increases, there is a challenge for the storage to keep up with the SQL engine. To the rescue comes our hero Quicksilver, or the name in real life – NVMe over TCP (NVMe/TCP). Developed by Lightbits Labs in 2016 and donated to the Linux community, it is the next evaluation of using NVMe based storage over TCP Fabric. NVMe/TCP simplifies how you interact with remote NVMe devices (targets) and allows your PostgreSQL storage to consume fast storage very easily and very efficiently. In this session I will explain the core concept of the NVMe/TCP protocol, current storage providers that can use it, how you can consume it in Kubernetes (super easy), and discuss the possibilities of using NVMe/TCP in private and public clouds. The session will also include performance numbers that were gathered on bare-metal servers on-prem and on AWS, using the latest PostgreSQL version and pgbench, showing the benefit of using multiple tablespaces when dealing with speed of light storage.