Optimizing the Optimizer: the Time-Series Benchmark Suite

QuestDB, an open-source time-series database known for its ultra-low latency and high ingestion throughput, used the Time-Series Benchmark Suite (TSBS) to optimize its performance. Initially based on InfluxDB's benchmarking tool, QuestDB's team discovered that TSBS itself was a bottleneck, prompting them to create a fork of TSBS for better optimization. By profiling and modifying the TSBS code, they improved data ingestion rates significantly, achieving up to 4.3 million rows per second. These enhancements included relaxed data validation and the removal of flow control in the TSBS loader. Despite submitting pull requests to the original TSBS repository, the lack of response led QuestDB to maintain their own fork, which includes optimizations, bug fixes, and support for InfluxDB v2. QuestDB continues to invite contributions to their open-source projects while promoting community engagement through their forum and live demo.