DuckDB vs PostgreSQL vs Meilisearch: Full-Text Search at Scale When dealing with 100 million documents, the choice of a full-text search engine isn't just about features—it's about raw performance, resource efficiency, and how well the tool fits your workload. A recent benchmark comparing DuckDB, PostgreSQL, and Meilisearch reveals surprising tradeoffs in build times, query latency, and memory usage that could reshape how you approach search infrastructure. The Test Setup: Real-World Workload, Real Hardware The benchmark used a 100-million-document corpus of Reddit comments (~50GB raw text, 14.8GB compressed Parquet) on a Hetzner AX-52 server (AMD Ryzen 7 7700, 64GB RAM, 2x 1TB NVMe). This wasn’t a synthetic test—queries were derived from production search logs, covering four classes: simple matches, multi-word phrases, fuzzy matches, and boolean queries. Each engine was tested with its latest stable version (DuckDB 1.1, PostgreSQL 17.4, Meilisearch 1.10) and optimized for performance.…