# Performance Stuttering With High Write Throughput

**URL:** <https://discuss.dgraph.io/t/performance-stuttering-with-high-write-throughput/19816>\
**Category:** Badger\
**Tags:** kind:question\
**Created:** [March 10, 2025, 8:46pm UTC](https://discuss.dgraph.io/t/performance-stuttering-with-high-write-throughput/19816 "2025-03-10T20:46:56Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Cody\_Littley](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex007/user_avatar/discuss.dgraph.io/cody_littley/32/11789_2.png) [@Cody\_Littley](https://discuss.dgraph.io/u/Cody_Littley)\
**Post date:** [March 10, 2025, 8:46pm UTC](https://discuss.dgraph.io/t/performance-stuttering-with-high-write-throughput/19816/1 "2025-03-10T20:46:56Z")

</div>

I am running a custom benchmark against BadgerDB. When I have a high write throughput, the DB “stutters”. These stutters last for 10 or more seconds. During a stutter, all read and write operations block.

- The workload is write heavy.
- Each key is 32 bytes, and each value is 1 megabyte.
- Once written, keys are not modified.
- Keys have an expiration time
- I batch write operations using transactions. Each transaction contains 100 key-value pairs, with an aggregate size of all values in a batch being 100mb.

I am currently running with mostly default options:

```auto
opts := badger.DefaultOptions(directory)
opts.Compression = options.None 

```

On my current hardware, I can achieve a sustained average write throughput of ~100mb/s. But the performance is not smooth. The DB does all of its work in frenetic, short bursts. For two or three seconds it accepts a large amount of work. Then, the entire system locks up for ~10 seconds. During the period of time when it is locked up, all read/write calls are fully blocked.

Although the overall write throughput is not bad, the jittery behavior has a lot of undesirable consequences for my intended use case. I don’t need single digit microsecond latencies, but waiting 10+ seconds for a read operation is problematic.

Has anybody observed this sort of behavior before? Are there ways I could configure badger to improve this stop-and-go stuttering behavior?