I wrote a nice blog post for the company I’m working at (Liefery) called “The curious case of the query that gets slower the fewer elements it affects”, which goes through a real world benchmarking with benchee. It involves a couple of things that can go wrong but how combined indexes and PostgreSQL’s EXPLAIN ANALYZE can help you overcome it problems. It’s honestly one of the blog posts I think I ever wrote so head over and read it if that sounds interesting to you :)