Benchmarks
Test Conditions
- VictoriaMetrics versions: v1.136.x (stable), v1.122.x (LTS)
- Date: April 2026
- Note: VictoriaMetrics publishes a community benchmarking tool: prometheus-benchmark. Results below combine official benchmarks and community reports.
VictoriaMetrics vs Competitors (Metrics)
Resource Efficiency
| Metric |
VictoriaMetrics |
Prometheus |
Thanos |
Mimir |
| RAM usage (1M active series) |
~2 GB |
~10–20 GB |
~8–15 GB |
~8–12 GB |
| Disk usage (compression) |
0.4–1.0 bytes/sample |
1.3 bytes/sample |
1.5 bytes/sample |
1.2–1.5 bytes/sample |
| Ingestion (single-node) |
~1M samples/sec |
~500k samples/sec |
N/A (sidecar) |
N/A (distributed) |
| Ingestion (cluster) |
100M+ samples/sec |
N/A |
~50M+ |
30M+ |
| Query latency (simple PromQL) |
< 100ms |
< 100ms (local) |
Variable (ObjStore) |
< 200ms |
Key Findings
- RAM: VictoriaMetrics consistently uses 5–10x less RAM than Prometheus for the same workload due to aggressive memory management and ZSTD compression
- Disk: ~50% less disk than Prometheus, due to specialized ZSTD + delta-encoding for floats/timestamps
- Cardinality resilience: VM handles high-cardinality spikes more gracefully via
-memory.allowedPercent, while Prometheus OOM-kills
Production Scale Records
| Company |
Scale |
Notes |
| Roblox |
Billions of active series |
100% uptime across quarters |
| DreamHost |
76M active series |
80% memory reduction vs previous stack |
| Grammarly |
Large-scale metrics |
10x cost reduction |
| CERN |
CMS detector monitoring |
Long-term Prometheus storage |
VictoriaLogs Benchmarks
| Metric |
VictoriaLogs |
Loki |
Elasticsearch |
| Storage efficiency |
10–30x less disk than ES |
10–20x less than ES |
Baseline |
| RAM usage |
Minimal (bloom filters, no inverted index) |
Low (label-only index) |
High (inverted index) |
| Ingestion |
Very high (columnar, batch writes) |
High |
Moderate (indexing overhead) |
| Query (filtered) |
Sub-second |
Sub-second |
Sub-second |
| Query (full scan) |
Depends on bloom filter selectivity |
Depends on label cardinality |
Fast (full-text index) |
| Full-text search |
✅ (via bloom filters) |
❌ (label-first) |
✅ (inverted index) |
Key advantage: VictoriaLogs allows free-text search WITHOUT mandatory label selectors, unlike Loki which requires {label="value"} first.
VictoriaTraces Benchmarks
| Metric |
VictoriaTraces |
Tempo |
Jaeger + ES |
| Storage |
Local disk (columnar + bloom) |
Object storage (Parquet) |
Elasticsearch cluster |
| External deps |
None |
S3/GCS required |
ES cluster required |
| RAM usage |
Low |
Low |
High |
| Trace ID lookup |
Fast |
< 200ms |
Fast |
| Search |
Bloom-filter-based |
Parquet column scan |
Full-text index |
| Operational overhead |
Very low (single binary) |
Low-moderate |
High |
Cost Comparison: Victoria Stack vs LGTM vs Datadog
At 1M Active Series + 100 GB/day Logs + 50M Spans/day
| Stack |
Est. Monthly Cost |
RAM Footprint |
Disk Footprint |
Ops Burden |
| Victoria Stack (self-hosted) |
$500–1,500 |
Lowest |
Lowest |
Low |
| Self-hosted LGTM |
$1,000–3,000 |
Medium |
Medium |
High |
| Grafana Cloud Pro |
$1,500–4,000 |
N/A (managed) |
N/A |
Low |
| VM Cloud (single-node) |
$225–1,300 |
N/A (managed) |
N/A |
Very Low |
| Datadog |
$5,000–17,000 |
N/A (SaaS) |
N/A |
Very Low |
Victoria Stack is typically 2–3x cheaper than LGTM due to lower resource footprint and no object storage costs.
Caveats
- Benchmarks heavily depend on "data shape" — active series churn rate, label cardinality, and query density
- VictoriaMetrics' RAM savings are most dramatic at high cardinality (> 1M active series)
- VictoriaLogs bloom-filter approach trades slightly higher CPU for dramatically lower RAM vs inverted indexes
- VictoriaTraces is newer and has fewer large-scale public benchmarks than Tempo
- Local SSD storage means you trade object storage durability for latency — use vmbackup to S3 for DR
- Run
prometheus-benchmark on YOUR workload before making migration decisions
Sources
| URL |
Source Kind |
Authority |
Date |
| https://docs.victoriametrics.com/ |
docs |
primary |
2026-04-10 |
| https://github.com/VictoriaMetrics/prometheus-benchmark |
tool |
primary |
2026-04-10 |
| https://victoriametrics.com/case-studies/ |
case study |
primary |
2026-04-10 |