The Four Horsemen Behind Thousands of Postgres Outages

The four horsemen behind Postgres outages

I explore the four critical issues causing massive Postgres outages: VACUUM inefficiencies, rigid connection limits, unpredictable query plans, and poor JSON handling. Drawing from real-world startup experiences, I detail how these architectural flaws lead to downtime and introduce pgrust, my Rust-based reimplementation designed to solve these problems with 64-bit transaction IDs, a thread-based model, and an adaptive planner.

"The difference between a good query plan and a bad one can be the difference between a query taking 10ms and taking 10 minutes."