The curious case of the query that gets slower the fewer elements it affects

I wrote a nice blog post for the company I’m working at (Liefery) called “The curious case of the query that gets slower the fewer elements it affects“, which goes through a real world benchmarking with benchee. It involves a couple of things that can go wrong but how combined indexes and PostgreSQL’s EXPLAIN ANALYZE can help you overcome it problems. It’s honestly one of the blog posts I think I ever wrote so head over and read it if that sounds interesting to you 🙂

Slides: Stop Guessing and Start Measuring (Poly-Version)

Hello from the amazing Polyconf! I just gave my Stop Guessing and Start Measuring talk and if you are thinking “why do you post the slides of this SO MANY TIMES”, well the first one was an Elixir version, then a Ruby + Elixir version and now we are at a Poly version. The slides are mostly different and I’d say about ~50% of them are new. New topics covered include:

• MJIT – what’s wrong with the benchmarks – versus TruffleRuby
• JavaScript!
• other nice adjustments

The all important video isn’t in the PDF export but you can see a big part of it on Instagram.

You can view the slides here or on speakerdeck, slideshare or PDF.

Abstract

“What’s the fastest way of doing this?” – you might ask yourself during development. Sure, you can guess, your intuition might be correct – but how do you know? Benchmarking is here to give you the answers, but there are many pitfalls in setting up a good benchmark and analyzing the results. This talk will guide you through, introduce best practices, and surprise you with some unexpected benchmarking results. You didn’t think that the order of arguments could influence its performance…or did you?