Schedule - PostgreSQL Development Conference 2025

Fast-path locking improvements in PG18

Date: 2025-05-14
Time: 17:00–17:25
Room: Breakout Room 3
Level: Advanced

Let's talk about the improvement in fast-path locking in upcoming PG18, which can bring substantial speedups on systems with many cores and/or queries accessing many relations (where "many" may mean "more than 16", and it includes indexes). This is particularly visible with partitioning, but easy to hit even without it.

I'll start by explaining how fast-path locking works, why it was introduced, and why it doesn't help with more relations. Then I'll explain how it was extended in PG18, and present some benchmark numbers to quantify the improvements.

Speaker

Tomas Vondra