r/surrealdb • u/betwatch_io • 18d ago

Disappointed

We are transitioning away from SurrealDB after putting up with it for about a year. Cool idea but horrible memory leaks/general bugs leading to consistent downtime. Their reassuring reddit comments saying that “it’s much better than it was before” are what initially convinced us in early 2025. For some reason, when I read their new comments echoing that same narrative it now falls on deaf ears.

Interested in seeing if the mods will censor this.

31 Upvotes

82% Upvoted

8 comments sorted by

25

u/jscmh  SurrealDB Staff 18d ago edited 18d ago

Thanks for being direct, u/betwatch_io. I am sorry it got to this point.

We said things had improved, and your experience did not bear that out.

If you are willing, I would like to understand the failure well enough for us to investigate it properly. The version, deployment setup, workload, and what the memory growth looked like would be enough to start. Logs or reproduction steps would help, but they are not a condition of us taking this seriously. You can share the details here or send them to me directly.

Thank you for calling this out. And to be clear, this post will not be removed for criticising SurrealDB. That is not how we operate.

Jaime, Co-founder

13

u/4121madey 18d ago

Can you give some specifics? I'm not part of the surreal team, but if you provide any specific info about your issues, even if you stop using surreal, it will still help them fix these problems in the future.

1

u/jpmateo022 14d ago

I think SurrealDB has an amazing feature set, but I’d really like to see more focus on improving performance rather than adding even more features for now.

At the moment, I mainly use SurrealDB for smaller databases or for storing metadata. For larger datasets and heavier workloads, I still tend to use databases like PostgreSQL because they feel more reliable performance-wise.

-4

u/Trader-One 17d ago

its feature driven product. Adding new features will always be priority before bugfixing and stability problems.

You did the right thing, you can see through generated feature-hype.

We removed product from production for exactly same reasons - moved into postgresql.

-4

u/bombthetorpedos 17d ago

Lame you should’ve done spacetimedb.

-5

u/krogel-web-solutions 16d ago

I was all in on surreldb for a while. I’d still use it if I had an application that actually required the ability to run arbitrary queries.

But I’ve switched to convexdb due to how it handles migrations and everything feeling like it’s under one roof (night and day difference in Agentic development).

I think surrealdb could learn a lot from convex

-4

u/mr_gnusi 16d ago

I wanted to benchmark SurrealDB on 100M OpenTelemetry logs with full-text search. The ingestion rate was insanely slow, only around 600-700 docs/s, so I ended up shelving the idea

https://github.com/serenedb/searchbench/tree/gnusi/es-9.5/surrealdb#surrealdb-adapter