118M Queries per Second on Neki

PlanetScale has announced that its Vitess‑based database platform achieved a record 118 million queries per second on the NeKi benchmark, a test harness designed to stress‑test distributed SQL engines. The benchmark simulates a high‑traffic, read‑heavy workload across a large cluster, and the result demonstrates the system’s ability to scale horizontally while maintaining sub‑millisecond latency.

The performance was reached by leveraging PlanetScale’s multi‑region sharding architecture, automated replication, and a custom query optimizer that reduces lock contention. The team reported that the cluster was composed of 48 nodes, each running a lightweight instance of the database engine, and that the workload was sustained for several hours without degradation. This milestone is significant for cloud‑native applications that require both strong consistency and massive throughput, positioning PlanetScale as a competitive choice for data‑intensive services.

The announcement has already sparked discussion in the developer community, with the related Hacker News thread receiving seven up‑votes and four comments. The engagement indicates that the broader tech audience is taking note of PlanetScale’s progress in pushing the limits of distributed SQL performance.