Note that (according to the linked commits), RethinkDB is using what we call "hard" durability in this comparison. This is our default to ensure maximum data safety.

Hard durability means that every individual write will wait for the data to be written to disk before the next one is run (in this benchmark, since it only does one at a time).

I don't think any of the other databases in this test is using a similarly strict requirement, are they?

You'd have to run with the currently commented line "rethinkdb.db('talks').table_create('talks', durability='soft').run(conn)" to get more comparable results.

(Edit for clarification: `durability='soft'` is comparable to the `safe` flag in many of the MongoDB drivers. It means that the server will acknowledge each write when it has been applied, but not wait for disk writes to complete.)