There is some experimental evidence that configuring smaller leaf page sizes in DSC leads to significant performance improvements for YCSB workloads. That makes sense - YCSB is a point-query/point-update workload, so out-of-cache variants of the workloads generally only need a single record per page being read. Reducing the size of the page (and network/compression/encryption overhead) facilitates better throughput.

The trade off for small pages is that scan workloads need to read more pages, and thus experience worse performance. WiredTiger introduced "prefetch" functionality recently, which would ameliorate the overhead of reading additional pages (in terms of user experienced latencies) because pages can be retrieved into cache by background worker threads.

We should try enabling prefetch for YCSB workloads. If performance is neutral or improved we should enable prefetch by default. Some care should be given to choosing default configuration settings.