you are good to be suspicious into any benchmark(as even the original slides note). I dont think we really have any information as it relates to transaction bo

you are good to be suspicious into any benchmark(as even the original slides note). I dont think we really have any information as it relates to transaction boundaries present, nor clients used: From the slides: "Scripts read a CSV file, parse it into the appropriate format, INSERT it into the database. • We measure total load time, including parsing time. • (COPY will be much much much faster.) • mongoimport too, most likely." Postgres does its best to use intelligent defaults, but it is only a part of the system, it is generally up to practioners to be wary. Tools like: http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/pgtestfsync.html http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/pgtestfsync.ht... Assist in this goal, but generally have to watch out for things like raid controllers that are not battery backed etc ( depending upon your environment). There is no mention of the number of clients used directly. I was simply trying to highlight that with the (little) information available, it is very possible. It is also possible, that the session(s) should themselves choose to pursue an asynchronous commit strategy ( on a session level see:http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.2/static/wal-async-commit.html http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.2/static/wal-async-commit.h... ) which would also not require modifying the configuration, I do not know as I have not seen the scripts, but it is similar to how a library could interact with: http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/reference/command/getLastError/ http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/reference/command/getLastErro... Thanks.