Comment by kelseydh

Thanks for the code and clarification. I'm surprised the TB team didn't pick it up, but your individual transfer test is a pretty poor representation. All you are testing there is how many batches you can complete per second, giving no time for the actual client to batch the transfers. This is because when you call createTransfer in GO, that will synchronously block.

For example, it is as if you created an HTTP server that only allows one concurrent request. Or having a queue where only 1 worker will ever do work. Is that your workload? Because I'm not sure I know of many workloads that are completely sync with only 1 worker.

To get a better representation for individual_transfers, I would use a waitgroup

  var wg sync.WaitGroup
  var mu sync.Mutex
  completedCount := 0

  for i := 0; i < len(transfers); i++ {
    wg.Add(1)
    go func(index int, transfer Transfer) {
     defer wg.Done()

     res, _ := client.CreateTransfers([]Transfer{transfer})
     for _, err := range res {
      if err.Result != 0 {
       log.Printf("Error creating transfer %d: %s", err.Index, err.Result)
      }
     }

     mu.Lock()
     completedCount++
     if completedCount%100 == 0 {
      fmt.Printf("%d\n", completedCount)
     }
     mu.Unlock()
    }(i, transfers[i])
   }

  wg.Wait()
  fmt.Printf("All %d transfers completed\n", len(transfers))

This will actually allow the client to batch the request internally and be more representative of the workloads you would get. Note, the above is not the same as doing the batching manually yourself. You could call createTransfer concurrently the client in multiple call sites. That would still auto batch them

Appreciate your kind words, Kelsey!

I searched the recent history of our community Slack but it seems it may have been an older conversation.

We typically do code review work only for our customers so I’m not sure if there was some misunderstanding.

Perhaps the assumption that because we didn’t say anything when you pasted the code, therefore we must have reviewed the code?

Per my other comment, your benchmarking environment is also a factor. For example, were you running on EBS?

These are all things that our team would typically work with you on to accelerate you, so that you get it right the first time!

> you risk getting bottlenecked by all the attributes you'll need to wrap around the transaction in PostgreSQL to make it work in a real application.

The performance killer is contention, not writing any associated KV data—KV stores scale well!

But you do need to preserve a clean separation of concerns in your architecture. Strings in your general-purpose DBMS as "system of reference" (control plane). Integers in your transaction processing DBMS as "system of record" (data plane).

Dominik Tornow wrote a great blog post on how to get this right (and let us know if our team can accelerate you on this!):

https://tigerbeetle.com/blog/2025-11-06-the-write-last-read-...

Thanks Kelsey!

We’d love to roll up our sleeves and help you get it right. Please drop me an email.