I think a lot of these kind of posts are standalone assessment of your problems, understanding and solutions. Its debatable to term something as lack of expertise if one is trying to work with default settings of a tool and expecting a certain performance. Everyone is doing a continuous learning with the failures.

1. What I find interesting is that the experiment seems to be using a DB server with 96 cores, 384 GB RAM (https://github.com/dbos-inc/dbos-postgres-benchmark/blob/mai...). This is very critical part of any such experiment, it should have been called out. The database is vertically scalable and that too has its limits

2. Who is making connection, and from where has its own impact on performance and overall latency

3. 60k may seem big number, however in real world the things which bring the systems down are the bursts of traffic, not the regular traffic.

Personally I would never start with such a big server unless I am a big business. Its > 100K cost for one production DB cluster if I include read replicas and cross region redundancy