Edit: I'm dumb (and bad at reading words).

I don't believe this assessment is entirely fair -- MongoDB essentially commits every write to a majority quorum of nodes.

Remind me again how many machines a standard Postgres INSERT/UPDATE commits to?

(Disclaimer: I still like Postgres better.)

The benchmark measures almost exclusively read performance, so that's not really a question.

Now the real question is why mongodb isn't faster than postgresql in this test. MongoDB gives so many guarantees up just to get more performance, and then looses to PostgreSQL? This is the worst trade deal in the history of trade deals.

Oh oops, totally misread "read" as "write" :P

well I wouldn't account that benchmark. Not for mongodb and especially not for PostgreSQL. TechEmpower Benchmarks are mostly not really showcasing real world. Just looking at their PostgreSQL config will highlight that. (Especially: https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks/blob/mast...) And also most of the time their libraries/frameworks are outdated or not even configured correctly. It shouldn't be taken as a reference in any way without additional benchmarking.

Yep exactly. People fall for these benchmarks too easily (especially the ones released by 10gen themselves)