Newer Postgres engines (16 & 17) are using firecracker for the backend instead of full fat VMs. It’s a trade-off, you get better isolation and superuser access, the system gets better security, easier maintenance, and better scaling, but you lose a few seconds in startup time. It’s not x6 faster, it’s +5s for every fiddle, so quick fiddles feel much slower but longer-running fiddles you don’t notice so much.

Going forward, I don’t see me going back to VMs, firecracker is the future for Linux backends. The route to improving performance will be getting new hardware and making the firecracker VMs more slimline so they boot faster.