# Citus matches Neki performance at 10M QPS using fewer data nodes

> **Key takeaway:** Using a new Query Router architecture in StackGres 1.19, open-source Citus achieved 10M QPS using roughly half the data nodes required by PlanetScale's Neki.

**Published:** 2026-10-16T15:11:58+00:00 
**Source:** Planet PostgreSQL 
**Category:** databases-storage 
**Canonical URL:** https://fosswire.org/news/citus-matches-neki-performance-at-10m-qps-using-fewer-data-n.html 

## Summary
A new benchmark from StackGres compares the performance of open-source Citus against PlanetScale's Neki sharded PostgreSQL. By introducing scalable Query Routers to remove the single-coordinator bottleneck, Citus matched Neki's 10M QPS throughput while utilizing only 48% of the data nodes and significantly fewer vCPUs. The test was conducted on AWS Graviton4 instances using a read-only workload.

## Technical details of the Citus vs Neki benchmark
- **Architecture**: StackGres 1.19 introduces scalable **Query Routers** to replace the traditional single Citus coordinator.
- **Throughput**: Citus achieved **10,032,084 QPS** using 24 workers and 48 query routers.
- **Efficiency**: At the 10M QPS mark, Citus used **48% of the data nodes** (24 vs 50) and required **0.65x the total vCPUs** compared to Neki.
- **Hardware**: Tests ran on **AWS Graviton4 (arm64)** with local NVMe storage; workers used r8gd.16xlarge instances.
- **Workload**: A read-only **pgbench** workload consisting of single-row primary-key SELECTs, including hot and uniform key distributions.

## Why it matters
The results suggest that open-source sharding solutions like Citus can achieve massive scale with higher hardware efficiency than proprietary alternatives when using distributed coordinator architectures.