July 27, 2025Everyone is always wondering how to make Postgres faster, more efficient, etc, but nobody ever thinks about how to make Postgres slower. This is a Postgres tuning challenge, not a throttle-your-CPU-to-one-megahertz-and-delete-indexes challenge, so all changes must be on parameters in postgresql.conf . Postgres is now under one transaction per second, more than 7,000x slower than the default tuning, all without changing anything outside of postgresql.conf . io_method = worker io_workers = 1Well, Postgres is now well below even 0.1 TPS: more than 42,000 times slower than what we started with. I focused on the knobs that I thought would impact Postgres performance the most, and left most knobs untested.