Encryption at rest performance benchmark on Database Instances

Reviewed on June 23, 2025

In December 2024, the Scaleway Managed Databases team ran tests on DB-POP2-4C-16G Instances in a Private Network using pgbench. Several workloads (including read, oltp and large loads) were simulated with several scale factors (from 1M rows to 200M rows) and concurrent database connections set to 10. They measured the impact of encryption at rest on transactions, per second and latency.

Important

For more information on pgbench transactions, refer to the "What is the 'Transaction' actually performed in pgbench?" section of the official pgbench documentation.

Note

The workloads applied simulate heavy usage scenarios for the purposes of testing. During the beta of encryption at rest, no performance issues were raised by users. If you would like to share your own benchmarks with our team, feel free to reach out to us in the #database channel of the Scaleway Slack community.

The table below compares the different workload and setup combinations and indicates the performance results of each:

Workload Type	Setup	Scale Factor	Performance Impact
Read Workloads	Standalone	10	No impact
	Standalone	2000	No real impact with or without encryption at rest
	HA	2000	20-30% impact, likely due to disk writes being replicated. Refer to this blogpost to learn more about disk writes in read operations.
OLTP Workloads	Standalone	Any	15% performance drop with encryption at rest activated
	HA	10	15% performance drop
	HA	2000	Up to 30% performance drop
Large Data Load (29 GB)	Standalone	Any	10% additional latency
	HA	Any	40% additional latency due to semi-sync replication and encryption overhead

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