Yesterday afternoon one of my coworkers enlisted the help of employees company wide to load test a project we'd worked on together about a year ago. He'd made significant changes to the application server and wanted to see how much the server could handle in raw traffic/requests. So at 2:30 PM, half of the company I work for started hitting the application server running bogus reports...

I watched the PostgreSQL database backend while all of this was going on. By 2:34 PM, the system...