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PostgreSQL production incident caused by transaction ID wraparound

by tcp_handshaker on 4/18/2026, 8:34:31 PM

https://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/i-too-have-a-production-story-a-downtime-caused-by-postgres-transaction-id-wraparound-problem

Comments

by: rastignack

Just monitor it and you’re done. I’ve delivered and maintained hundreds of pg instances and never faced this issue. There is so much literature about it that at some point no one even slightly skilled will face it.

4/18/2026, 9:57:37 PM


by: plasticeagle

AI;DR<p>Which is why it&#x27;s<p>TL;DR<p>Boring shit article about obvious problem.

4/18/2026, 9:56:54 PM


by: throwatdem12311

TL;DR Don’t turn off auto vacuum and periodically tweak your write heavy tables so they are vacuumed regularly enough so this never happens.

4/18/2026, 10:03:00 PM


by: jffry

tl;dr: autovacuum was seen to be active during an earlier incident, assumed to be at fault, and was disabled. It was never re-enabled. The long-term implications of disabling autovacuum were not actively considered.

4/18/2026, 9:27:53 PM


by: fallpeak

TL;DR: Devs didn&#x27;t know what they were doing and turned off autovacuum and eventually it broke, then the author decided to have an AI slop out an article about the incident which may or may not have actually occurred.

4/18/2026, 9:40:35 PM