Making Postgres slower
15 comments
·July 27, 2025gerdesj
sschnei8
I always do that when working with a new cloud provider. I spend our Series A as fast as possible after which we can optimize cloud spend!
vichyvich
I love this! It would be great to have follow-ups and series of books about how to make things worse, as a way to learn to make things better.
Maybe it could be like O’Reilly, except the covers could have shittily-drawn fantasy animals, e.g. a 7-year-old’s drawing of a unicorn with a head on each side of its body both talking on their AirPods giving away their money to scammers, making PowerPoint slides, eating too much, doing hard drugs, live-streaming on Facebook, and standing on the railroad tracks with a train in the distance.
don-code
This strategy was actually used during World War II, to ensure pilots could come home safely. Weather forecasting not being what it is today, meteorologists determined what conditions would result in the _most_ lives being lost, then together with mission commanders "designed" missions to simply not meet those conditions.
Source: https://medium.com/butwhatfor/suppose-i-wanted-to-kill-a-lot...
setr
The missile knows where it is because it knows where it is not…
prisenco
I took a creative writing class and we had a portion where we read and analyzed bad writing then took good writing and rewrote it poorly and those were the most helpful writing exercises I've ever done.
sastraxi
Great writing style and articulation of thought! That was a fun read
oceanparkway
We need more of this
Waterluvian
Honestly, walking away in the wrong direction from default settings seems like a great way to really get a feel for their weight.
shmerl
Reminds A Ticket To Tranai.
stephenlf
Love the B Sanderson shoutout
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snickerdoodle12
Excellent. Now do 42,000x faster please.
mort96
You never specified a baseline. They could undo their changes and it's 42,000x faster again :)
preinheimer
Love it.
I think this is absolute genius.
If you are ever going to get to grips with optimizing something, why not do the opposite first or as a foil?
How often do you really fenangle your database (or other system) properly? Are your performance enhancements really based on science or cargo culting or something else?