Bug: Poor Postgres Performance

[spyr0-sec]

Description:

As discussed in the Slack thread, we are experiencing degraded performance when using the postgres database driver. The most noticeable issue is around multi-hop queries.

The example used in the thread was this but any strongly typed multi hop query seems to either hang or take a very long time.

MATCH p = (n:Base)-[:HAS_ACCESS_TO]->(:Safe)-[:Contains]->(:Secret)-[:CredentialOf]->(:Computer)

As this is using a mixture of AD and OpenGraph nodes, during debugging I was initially using the "Contains" edge which is already in-built, changing this to something custom did at the time seem to provide a bit of a performance boost but I think it may have been placebo.

Are you intending to fix this bug?

Happy to assist with any debugging / testing Postgres tuning

Component(s) Affected:

• UI
• API
• PostgreSQL

Steps to Reproduce:

1. Ingest AD and OpenGraph Data
2. Execute a multi-hop query such as the one above

Expected Behavior:

Graph data is returned in a reasonable amount of time.

Actual Behavior:

Data either does not return or takes a considerable amount of time.

Screenshots/Code Snippets/Sample Files:

N/A

Environment Information:

BloodHound: v8.2.0

Database: postgres:16

Additional Information:

https://bloodhoundhq.slack.com/archives/C20NG2L87/p1759060061111959?thread_ts=1759060061.111959&cid=C20NG2L87

Potential Solution (optional):

PostgreSQL tuning

Related Issues:

N/A

Contributor Checklist:

• I have searched the issue tracker to ensure this bug hasn't been reported before or is not already being addressed.
• I have provided clear steps to reproduce the issue.
• I have included relevant environment information details.
• I have attached necessary supporting documents.
• I have checked that any JSON files I am attempting to upload to BloodHound are valid.

[rookuu]

Adding onto this one, with similar long path queries we can see that a single CPU core is being utilised which appears to be our bottleneck.

[StephenHinck]

I've got this flagged internally to get our PostgreSQL config recommendations published. Will make sure this issue is tagged when that's published!

[spyr0-sec]

Hey @StephenHinck! Apologies for the chase but has there been any progress on this? 🤞

[rvazarkar]

@spyr0-sec Hey, I'm chasing this down right now. Theres 2 potential things going on here, one is DB tuning, which I'm finding our docs for so I can give you better suggestions. The second one is a potential issue with cypher translation which we have slated on our backlog.

At the very least I'll provide the tuning suggestions to see if that helps when I get them

[rvazarkar]

So going to just post a bunch of the tuning parameters we have marked as our recommendations assuming you have the CPU cores to handle it:

max_parallel_workers - Bump this up to 16
max_parallel_maintenance_workers - Bump this up to 4
work_mem - 64-128 MiB
default_statistics_target (important one!) - 2000-3500. Start on the lower end and work up to see where performance gets better for you
random_page_cost - If you're on an SSD, set this to 1

Hopefully this will be a decent starting point for better performance

[spyr0-sec]

Appreciate this @rvazarkar! I've handed this to our databases team and will report back