incident

This tag is associated with 2 posts

Postgres recovery_prefetch Considered Harmful and Causing Outages

Posted by Jeremy ⋅ October 20, 2026 ⋅ 1 Comment

Another story of something I saw in the field which surprised me. Turns out recovery_prefetch can cause outages. Something which has been happening quietly in the background all the time, but we didn’t notice until we looked close enough to see it. After a lot of work I discovered this was partly a case where … Continue reading →

Happiness Hint: Alarm on Checkpoint Time

Posted by Jeremy ⋅ June 24, 2026 ⋅ 2 Comments

Before starting, I want to put a few things at the top: You probably should not change the checkpoint_timeout setting from its default of 5 minutes. Users who read tuning advice on the internet (or get bad AI advice) about increasing this setting usually don’t understand the risk and significance of trading for RTO/availability. Let’s … Continue reading →