Boosting Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL with AWS Graviton5: Benchmarks

This article benchmarks AWS Graviton5 (M9g) instances against three previous Graviton generations (M6g, M7g, M8g) for Amazon RDS PostgreSQL using Sysbench OLTP workloads.

• M9g delivers 61,495 QPS versus 27,816 QPS on M6g—a 121% throughput increase
• p95 latency reduced 55% on M9g (40.37ms) compared to M6g (89.16ms)
• M9g achieves 604.9 queries per dollar versus 314.9 on M6g—92% better price-performance
• Each Graviton generation shows consistent improvements: M7g +17%, M8g +45%, M9g +30% over predecessor
• CloudFormation template provided for reproducible benchmarking across PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MariaDB
• M9g available in US East, US West, and Europe regions for PostgreSQL 13.18 and higher

Graviton5 provides significant performance and cost benefits for PostgreSQL workloads, with each generation advancing processor architecture for higher throughput and lower latency.