Making Postgres slower

175 AsyncBanana 16 7/27/2025, 9:12:59 PM byteofdev.com ↗

Comments (16)

vichyvich · 5h ago
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 · 4h ago
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 · 3h ago
The missile knows where it is because it knows where it is not…

https://youtu.be/bZe5J8SVCYQ?si=QrIlpJ6BuJADd_zF

prisenco · 4h ago
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.
adhamsalama · 41m ago
gerdesj · 4h ago
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?

sschnei8 · 3h ago
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!
therein · 36m ago
Cloud providers love this one trick.
sastraxi · 4h ago
Great writing style and articulation of thought! That was a fun read
stephenlf · 4h ago
Love the B Sanderson shoutout
shmerl · 5h ago
Reminds A Ticket To Tranai.
Waterluvian · 4h ago
Honestly, walking away in the wrong direction from default settings seems like a great way to really get a feel for their weight.
oceanparkway · 3h ago
We need more of this
preinheimer · 5h ago
Love it.
snickerdoodle12 · 5h ago
Excellent. Now do 42,000x faster please.
mort96 · 5h ago
You never specified a baseline. They could undo their changes and it's 42,000x faster again :)