Benchmarking Postgres 17 vs 18

The benchmarking exercise conducted by Ben Dicken evaluates the performance improvements in Postgres 18 compared to Postgres 17, focusing on the new io_method configuration option, which introduces io_uring for asynchronous disk reads alongside the traditional sync and new worker methods. The benchmarks, run on various AWS EC2 instance configurations with differing IOPS and storage types, reveal that while Postgres 18 shows notable improvements in I/O handling, especially with the worker method as the new default, the anticipated performance boost from io_uring is not as significant across all scenarios. The tests demonstrate that local NVMe storage consistently outperforms network-attached options, highlighting the importance of low-latency, high-IOPS environments for optimal database performance. Despite io_uring's potential, it is shown to excel mainly under high I/O concurrency, and does not universally outperform other methods, emphasizing that no single I/O configuration is best across all workloads.