When (not) to use varbit chunks

Prometheus recently added a new chunk encoding called “varbit” which significantly improves compression (up to 3x better) allowing for more data storage and potentially faster ingestion speeds. However, varbit encoding requires sequential access to data within a chunk, while the previous encoding allowed random access, potentially slowing down queries that request specific, non-adjacent samples. The article recommends sticking with the default double-delta encoding unless you’re facing disk space or I/O limitations, in which case experimenting with varbit encoding could be beneficial.