Interesting article but it gave me a bit of a panic attack. Benchmarking (with TPC or otherwise) is NOT the way to determine the correct approach here; that is strictly only to be used for databases (typically RDBMS) effectively “owning” the complete hardware they are running on. An embedded database might be used in that manner if it’s operating as the backend for a pure crud application that performs ~zero server side rendering, parsing, validation, etc and is essentially just an async http-to-SQLite interface. But more likely than not, an embedded db will be used and deployed on machines (not necessarily even servers) serving many a purpose, and need to perform best both within the confines of the resources available to the machine and in relative terms, necessarily making tradeoffs that might sacrifice performance for “value” in terms of CPU or memory usage.

This isn’t just with regards to benchmarking, it’s an essential consideration *any* time you are taking ownership of the cache away from the kernel, which is the only piece in the stack that has viability into the global state and can be trusted to give back memory under pressure to ensure everything plays nice together. It’s not limited to just databases or even just memory, for example FreeBSD has had greater than its fair share of issues that trace back to the ZFS having a separate cache from the kernel (despite the much tighter integration between the two and presence of various mechanisms to address pathological cases). You can also refer to any comparison or benchmark between the use of spinlocks vs mutexes: spin locks consistently perform better in/on (micro)benchmarks but are almost always actually the worse choice in the grand scheme of things because the benchmarks falsely assume complete and uncontended ownership over system resources.

This isn’t even io_uring specific and I’m hardly the first to bring this up in the context of O_DIRECT.