One of Tigris's standout capabilities is its performance when storing and retrieving small objects. To quantify this advantage, we benchmarked Tigris against two popular object stores—AWS S3 and Cloudflare R2—and found that Tigris consistently delivers higher throughput and lower latency. These gains let you use a single store for everything from tiny payloads to multi-gigabyte blobs without sacrificing efficiency.
Under the hood, Tigris accelerates small-object workloads by (i) inlining very small objects inside metadata records, (ii) coalescing adjacent keys to reduce storage overhead, and (iii) caching hot items in an on-disk, LSM-backed cache.
Our benchmarks reveal that Tigris significantly outperforms both AWS S3 and Cloudflare R2 for small object workloads. Our benchmarks show Tigris achieves sub-10ms read latency and sub-20ms write latency, while sustaining 4 x throughput than S3 and 20 x throughput than R2 for both operations.
To ensure our findings are reproducible, we outline the full benchmarking methodology and provide links to all artifacts.
Object Storage That's Faster Than S3 and R2 Tigris is 5.3x faster than S3 and 86.6x faster than R2 for small object reads. If your workload depends on reading lots of small objects—logs, AI features, or billions of tiny files—this matters. Check Out the Docs!
We used the Yahoo Cloud Serving Benchmark (YCSB) to evaluate the three systems. We added support for S3-compatible object storage systems (such as Tigris and Cloudflare R2), which was merged shortly after publish.
All experiments ran on a neutral cloud provider to avoid vendor-specific optimizations. Table 1 summarizes the test instance:
Table 1: Benchmark host configuration.
Component Quantity Instance type VM.Standard.A1.Flex (Oracle Cloud) Region us-sanjose-1 (West Coast) vCPU cores 32 Memory 32 GiB Network bandwidth 32 Gbps
We benchmarked a dataset of 10 million objects, each 1 KB in size. You can view our configuration in the tigrisdata-community/ycsb-benchmarks GitHub repo, specifically at results/10m-1kb/workloads3.
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