Drastic difference between pg and pg-native performance inserting bytea data

Schema:

CREATE TABLE test (
    id SERIAL PRIMARY KEY,
    data bytea
);

CREATE UNIQUE INDEX test_pkey ON test(id int4_ops);

test.js:

import fs from 'fs';
import pg from 'pg';

const image = fs.readFileSync('./test.jpg');

const main = async () => {
  const client = new pg.native.Client();

  await client.connect();

  let index = 1000;

  while (index--) {
    await client.query('INSERT INTO "test" (data) VALUES ($1) RETURNING id', [
      image
    ]);
  }

  await client.end();
};

main();

test.jpg

Evaluation:

$ time node ./test.js

Result with pg:

0.88s user
0.39s system
0% cpu
2:37.37 total

Result with pg-native:

4.95s user
0.16s system
19% cpu
26.118 total

That is a huge difference. What is the overhead?

[sehrope]

Yes that was my mistake trying this out. Using the the .native approach works fine for the getting promises return values.

Real issue is that libpq expects a string[] for the query parameters and pg-native doesn’t perform any type conversions. It blindly passes the params array to libpq which somehow is interpreted as a zero length string for the parameter value (so it inserts a zero length value). The performance difference is because the native version isn’t actually inserting anything so it’s not a valid comparison, just a bug in native.

Should either be documented as insisting on string[] parameters (and throw an error if not that) or use the same type conversions as the pure js driver.

[charmander]

Are you saying you did require('pg-native') instead of require('pg').native?