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Another reason postgres could be running very slow, is that it may be spooling the intermediate result to a temp file on hard disk.

Do you see a performance increase when using SSD Drives?

We didn't try SSD drives. It's a good idea, worth a shot for a future post.

You ran this on RDS? (mentioned in blog post)

I would be worried about external factors, nonstandard/non-default configs, and other such things impacting your tests.