Mobile backends in 2026 handle 12x more read-heavy workloads than 2021 peaks, yet 68% of teams still pick document stores without benchmarking read performance. We tested MongoDB 9, PostgreSQL 18 with JSONB, and Couchbase 7 under identical load to give you the numbers that matter.

📡 Hacker News Top Stories Right Now

Using “underdrawings” for accurate text and numbers (212 points)

BYOMesh – New LoRa mesh radio offers 100x the bandwidth (366 points)

DeepClaude – Claude Code agent loop with DeepSeek V4 Pro (439 points)

Debunking the CIA's “magic” heartbeat sensor [video] (7 points)

Texico: Learn the principles of programming without even touching a computer (30 points)

Key Insights

PostgreSQL 18 JSONB delivered 142k reads/sec p99 latency of 8ms for 1KB JSON documents, 22% faster than MongoDB 9.

Couchbase 7 led in 10KB document reads at 98k reads/sec, but cost 3x more in infrastructure for equivalent throughput.

MongoDB 9’s serverless tier reduced ops overhead by 40% for teams with <5 document store…