With auto-pause at 0 ACUs, the first query after a pause took 21.4 and 13.6 seconds to answer. Under sustained CPU load, the cluster went from 2 ACUs to its 16-ACU maximum in about two minutes, and tail latency fell from 24 seconds to 5. What that means for scale-to-zero databases behind real users.
Our measurements, November 2026.
Scale-to-zero is real savings for development databases and internal tools. For anything a customer waits on, a 14–21 second first request is an outage from their side. The full report has the scaling timeline at 30-second resolution, capacity from CloudWatch, a comparison with a provisioned instance, and settings that avoid the pause where it matters.
We'll model your traffic against pause and scaling behaviour and tell you which settings fit. 30 minutes, free.
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Database Failover Downtime on AWS, Measured: RDS Multi-AZ 13–15 Seconds, Aurora Under 2
We wrote to Postgres every 50 ms and forced failovers. RDS Multi-AZ lost writes for 13.0 and 14.8 seconds; in one trial the switch began three minutes after the reboot was requested. Aurora PostgreSQL lost writes for 2.0 and 0.5 seconds, one failed write each time. The full timelines, the errors your application will see, and what to set so it recovers on its own.
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DynamoDB vs Postgres, Measured in AWS: 53 Workloads From the Same Client
We ran 53 workloads against RDS Postgres 17 and DynamoDB from one Fargate task in the same Availability Zone, at 100,000, 1 million and 5 million orders. Key lookups took 0.35 ms in Postgres and 2.7 ms in DynamoDB; a two-item transaction 1.75 ms against 20 ms; a question nobody designed for, 0.08–2.7 s against a full table scan. The full results, with the method and every caveat.
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As of November 9, 2026. Provided as is, for general information, and accurate to the best of our knowledge on the date shown. Not legal, compliance, tax, financial or other professional advice. Prices, limits and vendor services change; check current vendor documentation before relying on anything here. Terms of use.