Plurrrr

So imagine you need to get multiple files and folders from an API. One option for doing so is to get all the file names and request them from what ever file server you are using. This is terrible don't do this. The optimal way is to bundle the entire directory into a compressed format and distribute that one file. Okay great, say you needed these files in an iOS/iPadOS or MacOS application. That means you will need to decompress the files that you received in swift.

Timsort is a sorting algorithm that is efficient for real-world data and not created in an academic laboratory. Tim Peters created Timsort for the Python programming language in 2001. Timsort first analyses the list it is trying to sort and then chooses an approach based on the analysis of the list.

If you’ve been running PostgreSQL for a while, you’ve heard about autovacuum. Yes, autovacuum, the thing which everybody asks you not to turn off, which is supposed to keep your database clean and reduce bloat automatically.

And yet—imagine this: one fine day, you see that your database size is larger than you expect, the I/O load on your database has increased, and things have slowed down without much change in workload. You begin looking into what might have happened. You run the excellent Postgres bloat query and you notice you have a lot of bloat. So you run the VACUUM command manually to clear the bloat in your Postgres database. Good!

But then you have to address the elephant in the room: why didn’t Postgres autovacuum clean up the bloat in the first place…? Does the above story sound familiar? Well, you are not alone. 😊