By Simeon Griggs Houseplants often die from over-watering, not neglect. It is easy to project human needs onto them: "If I am thirsty, they must be thirsty too." But many indoor plants actually benefit from drying out between waterings. Similarly, your empathy can lead to misinterpreting signals from your database. You don't like feeling overwhelmed, so you don't want your database overwhelmed either. But not all usage is created equal, and memory in computers can be uniquely complex to understand. A look at your PlanetScale dashboard might show memory usage sitting at 80%. That looks bad, but it could actually be representative of a healthy system. To be clear, consistently high CPU usage is a problem. For as long as CPU stays high, queries wait longer, the slowest queries get slower, and you have less headroom for spikes. Memory is different. The percentage shown in the cluster diagram on your PlanetScale dashboard is measuring the entire node your database runs on, not just Postgres.…