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ThingsBoard Cloud

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Performance

ThingsBoard performance was benchmarked on AWS EC2 instances using MQTT smart-meter emulators. Each test ran for 24+ hours to capture steady-state behavior and long-term stability.

Benchmark Results

Section titled “Benchmark Results”

All tests used a single ThingsBoard instance in monolithic mode with the specified database and queue configuration.

Scenario Devices msg/sec dp/sec Instance Queue Database Avg CPU Disk IOPS
A 100K 111 333 c5.xlarge In-Memory PostgreSQL 5% 50
B 100K 1,111 3,333 c5.xlarge In-Memory PostgreSQL 20% 350
C 100K 1,111 3,333 c5.xlarge Kafka PostgreSQL 25% 400
D 500K 5,555 16,666 c5.4xlarge Kafka Cassandra 40% 800
E 1M 11,111 33,333 c5.9xlarge Kafka Cassandra 55% 1,200

Instance specs reference:

Instance vCPU RAM Network
c5.xlarge 4 8 GB Up to 10 Gbps
c5.4xlarge 16 32 GB Up to 10 Gbps
c5.9xlarge 36 72 GB 10 Gbps

Key Findings

Section titled “Key Findings”
  • Cassandra is ~5× more disk-efficient than PostgreSQL for time-series data at the same write rate — critical for high-throughput deployments.
  • In-memory queue works well up to ~3K dp/sec but becomes unreliable at 10× that rate due to back-pressure. Use Kafka for production loads above 5K dp/sec.
  • 100K concurrent MQTT connections consume approximately 6.5 GB of RAM on the transport layer.
  • Kafka overhead is minimal — scenarios B (in-memory) and C (Kafka) show nearly identical CPU at the same message rate, with Kafka adding ~5% CPU and better reliability.
  • CPU scales linearly with message throughput. Doubling the data point rate roughly doubles CPU utilization.

Disk Usage

Section titled “Disk Usage”

Daily disk consumption at 333 data points per second:

Database Daily disk 30-day disk Notes
PostgreSQL ~4.8 GB ~144 GB Row-per-data-point, no built-in compression
Cassandra ~1.0 GB ~30 GB Columnar compression, configurable TTL

Recommendations

Section titled “Recommendations”
Use case Recommended setup
Development / testing Monolith, PostgreSQL, in-memory queue
≤100K devices, ≤3K dp/sec Monolith, PostgreSQL, in-memory or Kafka
100K–500K devices, ≤15K dp/sec Monolith or small cluster, Cassandra, Kafka
500K+ devices, 15K+ dp/sec Microservices cluster, Cassandra, Kafka

For deployment architecture options and cluster sizing, see Deployment Scenarios.

© 2026 The ThingsBoard Authors