Do you performance test new servers, PostgreSQL versions, configuration changes, and extensions before you deploy them in production? Yes? No?

If not, learn how, and if so, learn some tools to do it better. Finding out that your new server has disk issues, or that 3000 IOPS isn't enough, or that Postgres 9.4 has a performance regression, or that those autovacuum settings changes don't work the way you'd expect once you hit peak production workload can be disastrous. You want to make sure that your database server is going to perform before your always-on web service is depending on it. But how? At PostgreSQL Experts, we use a three-stage testing process:

1. Basic hardware tests

2. pgbench

3. workload replay test

We will briefly go over the open source tools available for each of these tests, what to look for, and how to integrate performance smoke testing into your general workload.