Eleven reporting indexes dropped from production tables, measured on the write path.
orders INSERT p50 1.9ms → 1.1ms
orders INSERT p99 8.4ms → 3.2ms
order_lines INSERT 2.4ms → 1.2ms
index storage 14.2 GB reclaimed
buffer pool hit rate 99.1% → 99.6%
at 41,000 inserts a day the p50 saving is 33 seconds of
database time daily, which is nothing.
the p99 halving is not nothing. the buffer pool change
is the one that matters.
The median saving is trivial and the tail is not, which is the usual shape of an index-removal measurement. The buffer pool figure is the second-order effect and the reason this was worth doing — eleven indexes were occupying memory the working set now has.