PocketBase benchmarks

This is a test PocketBase application with various benchmarks to serve as a general idea of what you could expect from a basic PocketBase instance without extra performance tuning or deployment on expensive server.

• Results
• Takeaways and things we'll have to improve
• About the benchmarks

Results

• Hetzner CAX11 (2vCPU ARM64, 4GB RAM, €3.95)

  • Pure Go results (default)
  • CGO results

• Hetzner CAX41 (16vCPU ARM64, 32GB RAM, €28.78)

  • Pure Go results (default)
  • CGO results

• Fly.io (1vCPU, 256MB RAM, free tier)

  • Pure Go results (default) (it requires swap to be configured to prevent OOM errors and restarts; fails the heavier posts100k tests most likely a result of some resources abuse protection)

Keep in mind that the benchmark runs together with the PocketBase instance on a single VPS with shared vCPU so the app performance can be slightly affected by the tests execution itself.

There are several optimizations that can be done and the benchmarks will change in the future so that the tests can run as part of the development workflow to track regressions, but for now improving the overall PocketBase dev experience remains with higher priority.

Takeaways and things we'll have to improve

• The Go and JS custom routes and app hooks perform almost the same for low and medium concurrency (with 50 prewarmed goja runtimes).

• At the moment there is no much difference in terms of query execution between the lower and higher spec Hetzner VMs (probably because most of the operations are I/O bound).

• The default data DB connections limit (max:120, idle:15) could be changed to be dynamic based on the running hardware to improve the overall performance and reduce the memory usage.

• With higher concurrency individual query performance degrades (probably because the runtime has to do more work, there is context switching involved, locks, etc.) but still the overall requests completion is better for most of the times.

• Basic API rules don't have significant impact on the performance.

• Aggregations (COUNT, GROUP BY, etc.) over large datasets are slow (especially when there are JOINS). If your list/search request doesn't need the totalPages and totalItems fields, you can set the ?skipTotal=1 query parameter to skip the extra COUNT query executed by default with the request (for first page results this could drastically drop the query execution from ~3.5s to ~9ms). Creating appropriate indexes can also help speeding up the execution.

• To prevent unnecessary JOIN statements we can implement internally a special condition that will treat single relation field statements like rel.id = @request.auth.id the same as rel = @request.auth.id. Done.

• The existing json column normalizations (eg. CASE WHEN json_valid ...) have some impact on the performance (~10%) and can be further optimized by removing them entirely and ensuring that the field values are always stored in the correct format before create/update persistence (either on app level or triggers).

• The CGO mattn/go-sqlite3 driver for some SELECT queries in large datasets can be ~1.5x-4x times faster. Building with a CGO driver is the easiest way to boost the query performance without changing your db structure or hardware but keep in mind that it complicates cross-compilation.

About the benchmarks

The application uses the develop branch of PocketBase.

The test database is ~180MB and has the following collections structure:

In order to emulate real usage scenarios as close as possible, the tests are grouped in several categories:

• create - Tests the write (insert) HTTP API performance. It is also responsible for populating the test database.

• auth - Tests various auth related HTTP APIs (auth with password, token refresh, etc.).

• fetch - Tests the read HTTP API performance (listing records, generating new tokens, etc.). It also contains scenarios with mixed list and update tests to observe how mixed read/write operations affects each other.

• custom - Tests for custom Go and JS code (routes, middlewares, hooks, etc.).

• delete - Test the delete HTTP API performance (including cascade delete).

Run the benchmarks

To run the benchmarks locally or on your server, you can:

0. Install Go 1.23+ (if you haven't already)
1. Clone/download the repo
2. Run GOOS=linux GOARCH=amd64 CGO_ENABLED=0 go build (https://go.dev/doc/install/source#environment)
3. Start the created executable by running ./app serve.
4. Navigate to http:localhost:8090/benchmarks

By default all tests are executed in the previously mentioned test categories order, but you can also specify which exact tests to run using the /benchmarks?run=custom,delete query parameter.

The above will start the benchmarks in a new goroutine and once completed it will print its result to the terminal and in the benchmarks collection (note that some of the tests are slow and it may take some time to complete; we write the test result as a collection record to workaround various host providers DDoS protections and restrictions like persistent connections limit, read/write timeouts, etc.).