Performance overview

This page describes the approximate performance that Spanner can provide under optimal conditions, factors that can affect performance, and tips for testing and troubleshooting Spanner performance issues.

The information on this page applies to both GoogleSQL and PostgreSQL databases.

Performance and storage improvements

Performance and storage improvements have rolled out to all Spanner regional, dual-region, and multi-region instance configurations. You don't need to make any changes to your application or manually configure anything in your Spanner instances to take advantage of these improvements, which are offered at no additional cost. These performance improvements result in higher throughput and better latency in Spanner nodes in all instance configurations.

Increased performance throughput

All Spanner instance configurations have improved performance and offer increased throughput. The following table provides the approximate throughput (queries per second) for these Spanner instance configurations:

Instance configuration type	Peak reads (QPS per region)		Peak writes (QPS total)		Peak writes using throughput optimized writes (QPS total)
Regional	SSD: 22,500 HDD: 1,500	or	SSD: 3,500 HDD: 3,500		SSD: 22,500 HDD: 22,500
Dual-region and multi-region	SSD: 15,000 HDD: 1,000	or	SSD: 2,700 HDD: 2,700		SSD: 15,000 HDD: 15,000

For information about the performance throughput of these instance configurations, see Performance for typical workloads. For more information about using solid-state drives (SSD) and hard disk drives (HDD) to store your data, see Tiered storage overview.

Read guidance is given per region (because reads can be served from any read-write or read-only region), while write guidance is for the entire configuration. Read guidance assumes you're reading single rows of 1KB. Write guidance assumes that you're writing single rows at 1KB of data per row.

You can achieve peak write performance with throughput optimized writes by setting a batching delay of 100 ms. For more information, see Throughput optimized writes.

In general, both the read and write throughputs of a Spanner instance scale linearly as you add more compute capacity (nodes or processing units) to the instance. For example, if a single-region Spanner instance with 2 nodes can provide up to 45,000 reads per second, then a single-region Spanner instance with 4 nodes can provide up to 90,000 reads per second.

If your Spanner workload doesn't achieve the expected performance, then see troubleshooting query performance regressions for information about common causes.

Increased storage

For all Spanner regional, dual-region, and multi-region instance configurations, each node (1,000 processing units) of compute capacity in the instance has an increased storage capacity of 10 TiB.

Performance for typical workloads

All Spanner instance configurations have improved performance and offer increased throughput.

Performance for regional configurations

Each 1,000 processing units (1 node) of compute capacity can provide the following peak performance (at 100% CPU) in a regional instance configuration:

Peak reads (QPS per region)		Peak writes (QPS total)		Peak writes using throughput optimized writes (QPS total)
SSD: 22,500 HDD: 1,500	or	SSD: 3,500 HDD: 3,500		SSD: 22,500 HDD: 22,500

For regional instance configurations that support optional read-only replicas, each optional read-only replica provides an additional 7,500 reads per second for SSD storage and 500 reads per second for HDD storage.

Note: These throughput numbers are estimates only, and they reflect a read-only or write-only workload. Spanner throughput is highly dependent on workload, schema design, and dataset characteristics. These throughput numbers can help as a starting point when you are estimating the approximate compute capacity (nodes or processing units) required for your Spanner instance. But these numbers can't be used for exact sizing and cost estimates.

Performance for dual-region configurations

Each 1,000 processing units (1 node) of compute capacity provides the following peak performance (at 100% CPU) in a dual-region instance configuration. To increase write throughput beyond the numbers in the table, use throughput optimized writes. For more information, see Throughput optimized writes.

Base configuration name	Approximate peak reads (QPS per region)	Approximate peak writes (QPS total)
dual-region-australia1	SSD: 15,000 HDD: 1,000	SSD: 2,700 HDD: 2,700
dual-region-germany1	SSD: 15,000 HDD: 1,000	SSD: 2,700 HDD: 2,700
dual-region-india1	SSD: 15,000 HDD: 1,000	SSD: 2,700 HDD: 2,700
dual-region-japan1	SSD: 15,000 HDD: 1,000	SSD: 2,700 HDD: 2,700

The read guidance applies per region because any region can serve reads, whereas the write guidance applies to the entire configuration. This guidance assumes that you read and write single rows at 1 KB of data per row.

Performance for multi-region configurations

Each Spanner multi-region instance configuration has slightly different performance characteristics based on the replication topology. Use throughput optimized writes to increase write throughput beyond the numbers in the table.

Each 1,000 processing units (1 node) of compute capacity can provide the following peak performance (at 100% CPU):

Base configuration name	Approximate peak reads (QPS per region)	Approximate peak writes (QPS total)
asia1	SSD: 15,000 HDD: 1,000	SSD: 2,700 HDD: 2,700
asia2	SSD: 15,000 HDD: 1,000	SSD: 2,700 HDD: 2,700
eur3	SSD: 15,000 HDD: 1,000	SSD: 2,700 HDD: 2,700
eur5	SSD: 15,000 HDD: 1,000	SSD: 2,700 HDD: 2,700
eur6	SSD: 15,000, 7,500 for each optional read-only replica HDD: 1,000, 500 for each optional read-only replica	SSD: 2,700 HDD: 2,700
eur7	SSD: 15,000, 7,500 for each optional read-only replica HDD: 1,000, 500 for each optional read-only replica	SSD: 2,700 HDD: 2,700
nam3	SSD: 15,000, 7,500 for each optional read-only replica HDD: 1,000, 500 for each optional read-only replica	SSD: 2,700 HDD: 2,700
nam6	SSD: 15,000 in us-central1 and us-east1 7,500 in us-west1 and us-west2 HDD: 1,000 in us-central1 and us-east1 500 in us-west1 and us-west2 [1]	SSD: 2,700 HDD: 2,700
nam7	SSD: 15,000, 7,500 for each optional read-only replica HDD: 1,000, 500 for each optional read-only replica	SSD: 2,700 HDD: 2,700
nam8	SSD: 15,000 HDD: 1,000	SSD: 2,700 HDD: 2,700
nam9	SSD: 15,000 HDD: 1,000	SSD: 2,700 HDD: 2,700
nam10	SSD: 15,000 HDD: 1,000	SSD: 2,700 HDD: 2,700
nam11	SSD: 15,000, 7,500 for each optional read-only replica HDD: 1,000, 500 for each optional read-only replica	SSD: 2,700 HDD: 2,700
nam12	SSD: 15,000 HDD: 1,000	SSD: 2,700 HDD: 2,700
nam13	SSD: 15,000 HDD: 1,000	SSD: 2,700 HDD: 2,700
nam14	SSD: 15,000 HDD: 1,000	SSD: 2,700 HDD: 2,700
nam15	SSD: 15,000 HDD: 1,000	SSD: 2,700 HDD: 2,700
nam16	SSD: 15,000 HDD: 1,000	SSD: 2,700 HDD: 2,700
nam-eur-asia1	SSD: 15,000 HDD: 1,000	SSD: 2,700 HDD: 2,700
nam-eur-asia3	SSD: 15,000 HDD: 1,000	SSD: 2,700 HDD: 2,700

• [1]: us-west1 and us-west2 provide only half of the QPS performance because they contain one replica per region instead of two.

The read guidance applies per region because any region can serve reads, whereas the write guidance applies to the entire configuration. This guidance assumes that you read and write single rows at 1 KB of data per row.

Run your typical workloads against Spanner

Always run your own typical workloads against a Spanner instance when doing capacity planning, so you can figure out the best resource allocation for your applications. Google's PerfKit Benchmarker uses YCSB to benchmark cloud services. To create tests for your own workloads, follow the PerfKitBenchmarker tutorial for Spanner. When doing so, you should tune the parameters in the benchmarking configuration yaml files to make sure that the generated benchmark reflects the following characteristics in your production environment:

• Total size of your database
• Schema (for example, row key size, number of columns, and row data sizes)
• Data access pattern (row key distribution)
• Mixture of reads versus writes
• Type and complexity of queries

Reproduce benchmark numbers

To reproduce the benchmark numbers, follow the Benchmarking Spanner with PerfKit Benchmarker tutorial using the corresponding yaml files in the throughput_benchmark folder.

To benchmark instances in an instance configuration that has undergone performance improvements, ensure that your tests are running in one of these improved instance configurations.

Zonal and regional failure protection

When running your workloads in production, it is important to provision enough compute capacity to continue to serve your traffic in the event of the loss of an entire zone (for regional instances) or an entire region (for dual-region and multi-region instances). For more information about the recommended maximum CPU, see alerts for high CPU utilization.

What's next

• Learn how to design a Spanner schema.
• Find out how to monitor Spanner performance.
• Learn how to troubleshoot issues with Key Visualizer.
• Learn about Spanner pricing.