# 118 million queries per second

> PlanetScale pushed its new Neki database to 512 shards and watched throughput scale almost perfectly linearly.
- Title: 118 million queries per second · Planetscale | Shortify
- Summary: PlanetScale pushed its new Neki database to 512 shards and watched throughput scale almost perfectly linearly. When each shard's workload is isolated, adding…
- Keywords: databases, scalability, sharding, postgres, benchmarks, technology, startups, 118, million, queries, second, Planetscale
- Source: Planetscale — https://planetscale.com/blog/118-million-queries-per-second-on-neki
- Published: 2026-09-11T00:00:00+00:00
- Read time: 1 min
- Topics: databases, scalability, sharding, postgres, benchmarks, technology, startups
## A million was too easy
Neki hit platform preview, and the team celebrated by aiming for 1 million queries per second. Five shards got there almost immediately, so they kept going.

> We hit this goal pretty quickly on 5 shards and decided to see how much further we could push it.
## The simplest possible query
One point select per query, a single row fetched by primary key. No writes, no joins, nothing spanning more than one shard, so every shard's load stayed isolated.

> A single-shard point select, one row fetched per-query by primary key.
## Five, fifty, five hundred
The target was 200k QPS per shard, then grow the cluster. Going from 5 shards to 50, the per-shard rate held within 0.8%.

> Ten times the shards, ten times the throughput. Then ten times again.
## Headroom to spare
At 512 shards the hardware still had room, so they let the load generator take it. Each shard settled at 231k QPS instead of the 200k target.
## What 118.5 million looks like
Sustained for 16 minutes: 512 Postgres primaries, 480 routers, 1.22 PiB of data, 15.8M read IOPS, over 2 Tb per second on the network.

> p99 latency of 6.06ms at the router and 13.95ms at the client
## The fine print they own
Shards ran primary-only with no replicas, the workload was read-only, and nothing failed over during the measured window. Errors ran at one query in 1.8 million.

> we did not fail over during the measured window
## Key takeaway

When each shard's workload is isolated, adding shards adds throughput in a straight line: 10x the shards gave 10x the queries, twice over.