PostgreSQL Full-Text Search: Fast When Done Right (Debunking the Slow Myth)

You might have come across discussions or blog posts suggesting that PostgreSQL's built-in full-text search (FTS) struggles with performance compared to dedicated search engines or specialized extensions. A notable recent example comes from Neon's blog post, "Performance Benchmark: pg_search on Neon" (link). In their benchmark, Neon compared query performance on their database platform with their pg_search extension (based on Rust's Tantivy library via pgrx ) against the Postgres built-in fulltext search setting with tsvector and GIN index. They commendably stated they optimized this standard setup by adding GIN indexes where appropriate (benchmark code available here). However, while adding GIN indexes is a necessary first step, their results showing significantly slower performance for the "standard" setup suggest crucial additional optimization steps for PostgreSQL FTS were likely missed. The conclusion that standard FTS is inherently much slower than pg_search might be based on a ... Read full article.