GoKawiilNeki database platform hits 118 million queries per second in benchmark test
The team behind Neki, released in platform preview, ran a benchmark scaling from 5 to 512 shards and reached 118,538,803 sustained queries per second over 16 minutes, using 1.22 PiB of data across 512 Postgres primaries and 480 routers. The test consisted only of single-shard point-select reads by primary key, with no writes, joins, or cross-shard queries, and per-shard throughput actually rose to 231,521 QPS at full scale, well above the initial 200k target.
GoKawiil's interpretation of the reporting above, not reported fact.
The near-linear scaling from 5 to 512 shards suggests Neki's routing architecture can grow throughput without proportional loss of per-shard efficiency, a common bottleneck in distributed databases. Because the test excluded writes, replicas, and failover scenarios, it demonstrates raw read capacity rather than real-world resilience, so production performance under mixed workloads remains an open question.
- Neki scaled from 1 million to 118.5 million queries per second across 512 shards
- Per-shard throughput held steady near 200k QPS and even exceeded it at full scale
- The benchmark used only single-shard reads, excluding writes, joins, replicas, and failover
Designing Data-Intensive Applications (Martin Kleppmann) — If benchmarks like 118M QPS across 512 shards fascinate you, this is the book that explains why sharding, replication and partitioning behave the way they do. Kleppmann walks through the tradeoffs behind scaling databases horizontally, making stories like this Neki run far more readable. A staple on any backend engineer's shelf.
See Designing Data-Intensive Applications (Martin Kleppmann) on Amazon → Affiliate link — we may earn a commission on purchases, at no extra cost to you. Product picked by AI based on this article; it is not a tested recommendation.Source: planetscale.com, 2026-09-11
Published there as: “118M Queries per Second on Neki”
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