Bare Metal vs. AWS RDS: A Deep Dive into NUMA-Aware Tuning and PostgreSQL Performance (Part 2)

Bare Metal vs. AWS RDS: CPU/NUMA Pinning and HugePages — How We Beat Aurora on Write Throughput (Part 2) In Part 1 , we established storage baselines — Local SSD vs Longhorn vs AWS managed PostgreSQL. This article goes deeper: CPU/NUMA pinning and HugePages push bare metal write performance past Aurora IO-Optimized at every concurrency level. In Part 1, we ended with CNPG Local SSD — bare metal with direct-attached storage and AWS-matched PostgreSQL config. Already leading Aurora on write TPS at baseline. The question was: how much further can we push it without adding hardware? Two steps. Significant results. Setup Recap Same constraint as Part 1: 2 vCPU / 8 GB RAM , single instance, no HA. Same PostgreSQL config matched to AWS defaults. Same benchmark: pgbench · scale factor 100 · 60s per run · 39 runs · ap-southeast-3. Where we left off — CNPG Local SSD (Baseline): Clients RO TPS RO Lat RW TPS RW Lat TPC-B TPS TPC-B Lat 1 749 1.34 ms 134 7.48 ms 99 10.10 ms 10 7,675 1.30 ms 1,425 7.