Benchmarking: 3 real scaling case studies
3 of the 73 engineering write-ups in our database are tagged with the technique "benchmarking". They come from 2 companies (PlanetScale and Supabase) and were published between 2022 and 2026. Stack that shows up most often in these stories: PostgreSQL (2). Often combined with horizontal sharding (2). 3 of the 3 state concrete scale numbers, for example "118.5M QPS sustained for 16 minutes" (PlanetScale). Each card below links to our short summary and the original post.
118 million queries per second on Neki
PlanetScale benchmarked Neki, its sharded Postgres, with single-shard primary-key point selects. Targeting about 200K QPS per shard, it went from 5 shards (about 1M QPS) to 50 (9.9M QPS, per-shard rate within 0.8%) to 512 shards and 480 routers, sustaining 118.5M QPS for 16 minutes over 1.22 PiB with a p99 of 6.06 ms at the router and about one error per 1.8 million queries. PlanetScale notes the run was read-only, primary-only with no replicas, and had no failover during the measured window.
Supavisor: Scaling Postgres to 1 Million Connections
Supabase load-tested Supavisor, its Elixir Postgres pooler, with a million client connections.
One million queries per second with MySQL
PlanetScale benchmarked a horizontally sharded Vitess cluster up to one million QPS.