Andres is a great coworker to have at Citus Data, though I first ran into him on the mailing lists shortly after starting at Citus myself. I was tasked with figuring out &quot;why do certain read-only workloads fail miserably under high concurrency?&quot;<p>I had never touched PostgreSQL before, nor any Linux performance tools, but I noticed that replacing certain buffer eviction locks with atomic implementations could drastically help this particular case. I emailed the list about it and Andres was someone who chimed in with helpful advice. I wrote up what I&#x27;d discovered in my deep dive here: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;tiny.cc&#x2F;postgres-concurrency" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;tiny.cc&#x2F;postgres-concurrency</a><p>Turns out Andres was already working on a &quot;better atomics&quot; patch to provide easier methods of using atomic operations within PostgreSQL&#x27;s code base (my patch was a quick hack probably only valid on x86, if that). It&#x27;s been useful in removing several performance bottlenecks and—two years in—it looks like it&#x27;s still paying off.