What Is Bloat?
Unused space in PostgreSQL tables or indexes caused by frequent updates or deletes. If unmanaged, bloat can slow performance and inflate storage needs.
Why It Matters for PostgreSQL Performance
In PostgreSQL performance work, Bloat affects throughput, latency, or operational reliability depending on workload and configuration.
Practical Benchmarking Context
When benchmarking with pgbench, track how Bloat changes behavior across scale factor, client concurrency, and storage conditions.
Use this term together with workload shape, concurrency level, and scale factor when interpreting pgbench outputs. Isolated values can be misleading without full run context.
Example
Monitoring: Use pg_stat_user_tables and pgstattuple for detection.