Introducing QuestDB's new binary ingestion protocol: QWP

QuestDB has introduced the QuestDB Wire Protocol (QWP), a binary, columnar WebSocket-based protocol intended to complement its existing InfluxDB Line Protocol (ILP) ingestion support and provide a unified client interface for both writing and querying time-series data. In TSBS benchmarks on AWS hardware, QWP frames averaged about 97 bytes per row compared with 347 bytes for ILP, reducing network use and allowing prebuilt QWP data to reach roughly 19 million rows per second over a network versus ILP’s 5.3 million, while local tests reached 48 million rows per second at lower cardinality and 33 million at one million distinct series. The report notes that standard co-located TSBS tests can obscure QWP’s advantage because the benchmark stores ILP in ready-to-send form but requires QWP rows to be encoded during timed execution, making the loader rather than the database or protocol a limiting factor. QWP maintained near-constant network throughput across up to one million series through session-level dictionary encoding of repeated symbols, although server-side performance declined somewhat at high cardinality when network bandwidth was not the bottleneck. For queries, QWP returns columnar batches and performed especially well for larger result sets relative to PostgreSQL wire and HTTP interfaces, while also supporting streaming Apache Arrow results. QuestDB positions QWP as an additional option rather than a replacement for ILP, citing compatibility, local buffering and replay, and failover capabilities, while advising users to test performance against their own workloads.

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