July 7, 2026
Cloud chart, comment chaos
Show HN: PostgreSQL performance and cost across 23 EC2 instance types
This cloud price test found a bargain, and the comments instantly demanded a bigger showdown
TLDR: The benchmark’s big takeaway: one relatively cheap Amazon server setup hit the target performance for about $82 a month. The comments instantly turned that into a bigger fight over missing rivals, missing chip options, and whether the real story is storage speed, managed services, or both.
A shiny new Show HN post tried to do one very practical thing: show which Amazon cloud computer gives you the best PostgreSQL database performance for the least money. The headline result was refreshingly simple even for non-database people: if you want about 33,000 requests per second on a tiny 1 GB dataset, 30 of 52 setups made the cut, and the cheapest winner was m8g.large at about $82 a month. In other words, one budget-friendly option popped out of a sea of dots and pricing charts.
But the commenters were not content to clap politely and move on. They immediately turned this into a wish list, a mini courtroom, and a hardware fandom war. One camp wanted an even juicier face-off: managed database service versus do-it-yourself hosting on the exact same machine. Another group zoomed in on the storage side, arguing that speed delays matter more than the flashy top-line numbers, which is the kind of nerd fight that somehow becomes weirdly intense fast. Then came the classic cloud comment-section energy: "Cool, but where’s Azure?" and "Why are the AMD machines missing?"
The funniest vibe here is that nobody really said the benchmark was bad—they said it was too good to stop now. Readers treated it like the pilot episode of a drama series and immediately demanded spin-offs, bonus characters, and the surprise crossover episode with Aurora, Azure, local solid-state drives, and Team AMD. The benchmark found a cheap winner; the crowd responded by yelling, "Nice chart. Now benchmark absolutely everything."
Key Points
- •The article provides benchmarked PostgreSQL performance and cost data across 23 EC2 instance types.
- •Users can choose a data size and throughput target to find configurations that satisfy the requirement.
- •Each chart point represents a benchmarked combination of EC2 instance and disk configuration.
- •In the example shown, 30 of 52 configurations achieve 33,000 RPS at 1 GB.
- •The cheapest qualifying example configuration is m8g.large on gp3-baseline at $82 per month.