In summary, post-incident analysis revealed potential pitfalls with PostgreSQL’s autovacuum feature despite having auto-vacuum enabled. Trust in its performance decreased due to a major version upgrade causing loss of statistics and subsequent query slowdowns. Optimism regarding software behavior can lead to underestimation of risks, especially when multiple tasks are interconnected in large programming efforts (the planning fallacy). While research on programmers’ optimism compared to other professions is limited, it might be worth exploring how this trait affects reasoning about error cases and adjusting trust levels in code as bugs surface.
Complete Article after the Jump: Here!