Serverless Postgres Benchmarks

Reproducible operational benchmarks for managed Postgres platforms, currently covering Neon and Supabase.

Vendor pages tell you what a platform can do. This repo measures how long it actually takes: creating a project, branching a database, recovering from a cold start, running queries through a pooler. Every number published from this harness links back to a dated raw-results file in this repo so anyone can check the math or rerun it.

How it works

The harness is a small TypeScript runner that drives each platform's management API plus a regular pg connection:

1. Each operation (create project, branch, cold start, query latency) is run N times (default 20).
2. Every sample is recorded raw. Reports use median and p95, never single runs or averages of two.
3. Results are written to results/ as dated JSON with full environment metadata: region, plan/tier, API versions, client location, timestamp.
4. Everything the harness creates is namespaced bench-* and torn down afterwards. npm run teardown removes any stragglers.

Methodology rules

• Both platforms run in the same region (AWS eu-central-1 / Frankfurt).
• Latency-sensitive operations are measured from a client in the same metro (a Frankfurt VM), never from a laptop over home internet. Management-API timings (project create, branch, delete) are client-location-insensitive and may run from anywhere.
• Plans and tiers in use are documented in every results file. Free-tier runs and paid-tier runs are never mixed in one dataset.
• Raw samples are committed, not just summaries.
• Test resources are deleted after every run so nothing keeps billing.

Layout

harness/    TypeScript runner, provider adapters, operations
results/    dated raw results (JSON) with environment metadata
site/       results dashboard (Vite + React, hand-rolled SVG charts)

The dashboard builds with npm run build in site/ (output site/dist/); the results JSON is copied in as static assets so the deploy is self-contained. On Cloudflare Pages set the root directory to site, build command npm run build, output dist. npm run snapshot produces a single-file snapshot.html that renders without a server.

Running it

cd harness
npm install
cp .env.example .env   # fill in your own API keys
npm run bench -- --provider neon --op create-project --runs 20
npm run bench -- --provider supabase --op query-latency --runs 50
npm run teardown       # delete every bench-* resource on both platforms

You need your own Neon API key and Supabase personal access token. The harness only ever creates and deletes resources whose names start with bench-; it refuses to touch anything else.

Contributing

These benchmarks are open source on purpose: if something in the methodology looks off, there is a fairer way to measure an operation, or your own runs disagree with ours, open an issue or send a pull request. Corrections are welcome and get credited in the write-ups.

Results

See results/ for raw data. Published write-ups based on this harness are listed in RESULTS.md as they land.