The CARTO Core Team has embarked on a project to improve the performance of their core infrastructure, aiming for a 5x increase in velocity. They have been focusing on optimizing key components such as PostGIS, Mapnik, and PostgreSQL. By monitoring system metrics and running micro-benchmarks, they identified low-hanging fruit opportunities, including parallelism improvements, caching features, and memory management fixes. While they did not achieve the exact 5x goal in end-to-end benchmarks, they made significant progress across various projects, resulting in gratifying performance improvements and introducing new functionality, such as easier spatial test harnesses and support for PostgreSQL version 11. The team's efforts demonstrate that ongoing optimization and innovation can lead to substantial benefits for users.