Linux 7.0 Shows Significant PostgreSQL Performance Gains On AMD EPYC
With CockroachDB there were some small benefits when upgrading this single socket AMD EPYC 9755 server from Linux 6.19 to Linux 7.0...
For most other database workloads tested on the Linux 6.19 and Linux 7.0 Git kernels, there wasn't any real change for this AMD EPYC Turin server.
But when hitting PostgreSQL 18.1 on this AMD EPYC 9755 server, Linux 7.0 shot out with some rather astonishing gains over Linux 6.19 stable.
In particular, for PostgreSQL when dealing with both reads and writes there were the very nice performance gains on Linux 7.0. For read-only or read-heavy workloads there wasn't any real change compared to Linux 6.19.
But when running more PostgreSQL 18 read/write benchmarks on Linux 7.0 with this AMD EPYC server, there were additional very nice performance gains exhibited over Linux 6.19 at varying sizes and levels of concurrency. These are some very solid improvements over Linux 6.19. Finding these gains with Linux 7.0 is also excellent given that this kernel version will be powering the likes of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and Fedora Server 44 this spring. As for what's causing the gains, there have been a lot of low-level optimizations and enhancements to various Linux kernel data structures and the like this cycle. Offhand that's perhaps the possible explanation but will be interesting to test on more hardware and other configurations as time allows. In any case, with every PostgreSQL read/write workload tested there were decisive performance gains for Linux 7.0 on this AMD EPYC 9755 server.