For many production setups, taking a database snapshot involves transferring significant amounts of data over the network. The standard way to do this efficiently is to process data in batches. Batching reduces per-request overhead and helps maximize throughput, but it also introduces an important tuning problem: choosing the right batch size.

A batch size that works well in a low latency environment can become a bottleneck when snapshots run across regions or under less predictable network conditions. Static batch size configuration assumes stable networks, which rarely reflects reality.

In this blog post we describe how we used automatic batch size tuning to optimize data throughput for Postgres snapshots, the constraints we worked under and how we validated that the approach actually improves performance in production-like environments for our open source pgstream tool.