Upgrading Query Insights to Metal

This post details the migration of the PlanetScale Query Insights database, which is write-heavy with ~10k UPDATE/INSERT statements per second, from provisioned IOPS EBS volumes to PlanetScale Metal. The migration of the busiest shard to Metal resulted in a substantial decrease in query latency across all percentiles (P50, P90, P95, P99), with the upgraded shard executing queries faster than others. After upgrading all shards, similar performance improvements were observed, leading to a lower average backlog in Kafka consumers and increased capacity for future message volume, all without application or architecture changes.