--- title: The four horsemen behind thousands of Postgres outages description: Four common Postgres failure patterns that cause real production outages are examined, especially at startups without dedicated DBAs. First, VACUUM and... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/the-four-horsemen-behind-thousands-of-postgres-outages-tu19ush18 twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: The four horsemen behind thousands of Postgres outages | daily.dev og:description: Four common Postgres failure patterns that cause real production outages are examined, especially at startups without dedicated DBAs. First, VACUUM and... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/the-four-horsemen-behind-thousands-of-postgres-outages-tu19ush18 og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/TU19USH18.png og:image:alt: The four horsemen behind thousands of Postgres outages og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # The four horsemen behind thousands of Postgres outages **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 9 min read · 2 upvotes · 1 comments ## Summary Four common Postgres failure patterns that cause real production outages are examined, especially at startups without dedicated DBAs. First, VACUUM and transaction ID wraparound: Postgres's 32-bit transaction IDs can be exhausted, forcing a database shutdown; solutions include 64-bit transaction IDs or undo-log architectures. Second, connection limits: Postgres spawns a process per connection, making high connection counts expensive and requiring tools like PgBouncer as workarounds. Third, bad query plans: the planner can choose catastrophically slow plans with no fine-grained override mechanism like MySQL's planner hints. Fourth, JSON columns: Postgres collects no statistics on JSON fields, defaulting to a magic 0.1% selectivity estimate that almost guarantees bad plans, plus no cross-row compression. Each issue is discussed in the context of pgrust, a Rust-based Postgres reimplementation that addresses these problems through thread-based concurrency, planned 64-bit transaction IDs, an adaptive query planner, and JSON statistics/compression. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Community discussion Top comments from developers on daily.dev. **@trevorsuna** · 0 upvotes > A lot of these outages could be caught earlier with better alerts. Things like old transaction IDs, too many connections, sudden query-plan changes, and slow JSON queries are worth watching. A new database engine may fix some weak spots, but good monitoring still saves the day. ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [3 Lessons From Nearly Blowing Up a Production Database](https://daily.dev/posts/3-lessons-from-nearly-blowing-up-a-production-database-6ayktn7ub) · Atomic Spin · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#rust](https://daily.dev/tags/rust), [#postgresql](https://daily.dev/tags/postgresql) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/the-four-horsemen-behind-thousands-of-postgres-outages-tu19ush18) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"The four horsemen behind thousands of Postgres outages","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/the-four-horsemen-behind-thousands-of-postgres-outages-tu19ush18","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/the-four-horsemen-behind-thousands-of-postgres-outages-tu19ush18"},"datePublished":"2026-07-13T03:47:53.592Z","dateModified":"2026-07-13T03:48:16.786Z","description":"Four common Postgres failure patterns that cause real production outages are examined, especially at startups without dedicated DBAs. 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Things like old transaction IDs, too many connections, sudden query-plan changes, and slow JSON queries are worth watching. A new database engine may fix some weak spots, but good monitoring still saves the day.","datePublished":"2026-07-16T02:20:43.175Z","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/TU19USH18#c-7emRHsBHJ","author":{"@type":"Person","name":"Trevor Suna","url":"https://daily.dev/trevorsuna","image":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--dZ7gXxpp--/f_auto/v1784081551/avatars/avatar_EMoP47rpuw8DNjhp6R1b6?_a=BAMAMicg0"}}]} ```