A lot of people look to Citus for a solution that scales out their Postgres database, whether on-prem or as open source or in the cloud, as a fully-managed database as a service. And yet, a common question even before looking at Citus is: "what kind of performance can I get with Postgres?" The answer is: it depends. The performance you can expect from single node Postgres comes down to your workload, both on inserts and on the query side and how large that single node is. Unfortunately, "it depends" often leaves people a bit dissatisfied.
Fortunately, there are some fermi estimates, or in laymans terms ballpark, of what performance single node Postgres can deliver. These ballparks apply both to single-node Postgres, but from there you can start to get estimates of how much further you can go when scaling out with Citus. Let's walk through a simplified guide for what you should expect in terms of the read performance and ingest performance for queries in Postgres.
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