Good reminder to always remember Chesterton's Fence. The post indicates that the bottleneck occurs when "many thousands" of EC2 instances are connecting simultaneously. In order for this to happen, presumably someone had to turn `max_connections` way up on their database server to make this to work at all. Seems like the issue could have been avoided at that point with a bit more understanding about why the default is an order of magnitude or more lower than whatever they tuned it to.