> Has this person actually benchmarked kafka?
Is anyone actually reading the full article, or just reacting to the first unimpressive numbers you can find and then jumping on the first dismissive comment you can find here?
Benchmarking Kafka isn't the point here. The author isn't claiming that Postgres outperforms Kafka. The argument is that Postgres can handle modest messaging workloads well enough for teams that don't want the operational complexity of running Kafka.
Yes, the throughput is astoundingly low for such a powerful CPU but that's precisely the point. Now you know how well or how bad Postgres performs on a beefy machine. You don't always need Kafka-level scale. The takeaway is that Postgres can be a practical choice if you already have it in place.
So rather than dismissing it over the first unimpressive number you find, maybe respond to that actual matter of TFA. Where's the line where Postgres stops being "good enough"? That'll be something nice to talk about.
Then the author should have gone on to discuss not just the implementation they now have to maintain, but also all the client implementations they'll have to keep re-creating for their custom solution. Or they could talk about all the industry standard tools that work with kafka and not their custom implementation.
Or they could have not mentioned kafka at all and just demonstrated their pub/sub implementation with PG. They could have not tried to make it about the buzzword resume driven engineering people vs. common sense folks such as himself.
The problem is benchmarking on the 96 vcpu server, because at that point the author seems to miss the point of Kafka. That's just a waste of money for that performance.
And if the OP hadn't done that, someone here would complain, why couldn't the OP use a larger CPU and test if Postgres performs better? Really, there is no way the OP can win here, can they?
I'm glad the OP benchmarked on the 96 vCPU server. So now I know how well Postgres performs on a large CPU. Not very well. But if the OP had done their benchmark on a low CPU, I wouldn't have learned this.
you're missing the point. Postgres performs well on large CPU. Postgres as-used by OP does not and is a waste of money. It's great that he benchmarked for a larger CPU, that's not what people are disputing, they are disputing the ridiculous conclusion.