What Is Checkpoint?
A checkpoint writes all dirty pages from memory to disk and records a log point for recovery. PostgreSQL performs checkpoints periodically or when triggered.
Why It Matters for PostgreSQL Performance
In PostgreSQL performance work, Checkpoint affects throughput, latency, or operational reliability depending on workload and configuration.
Practical Benchmarking Context
When benchmarking with pgbench, track how Checkpoint 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
Config: checkpoint_timeout , checkpoint_completion_target