TLDR Web Dev · ARTICLES & TUTORIALS

FASTER INDEX I/O WITH NVME SSDS

marginalia.nu20 min read

Summary from the TLDR Web Dev newsletter

Marginalia Search improved its index performance by rewriting data structures to better use modern hardware (NVMe SSDs). The redesign involves a deterministic block-based skip list replacing B-trees and utilizing direct-mode reads, which surprisingly revealed that larger block sizes increase read speeds by a lot on NVMe SSDs.