Am I interrupting the data correctly in that, if you’re running on NVMe - it’s just so fast, that it doesn’t make a difference what mode you pick.

Afaict nothing in this benchmark will actually use AIO in 18. As of 18 there is aio reads for seq scans, bitmap scans, vacuum, and a few other utility commands. But the queries being run should normally be planned as index range scans. We're hoping to the the work for using AIO for index scans into 19, but it could work end up in 20, it's nontrivial.

It's also worth noting that the default for data checksums has changed, with some overhead due to that.

Thanks for posting this interesting article! Do we know if timescale extension is available as well?