The PostgreSQL Cookbook
Full-incident runbooks for the failures single error pages can't cover — replication lag, autovacuum bloat, lock storms, failovers. Each one a complete diagnose → fix → verify playbook.
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PostgreSQL Crash Due to OOM Kill
⚠️ Symptoms All active connections drop simultaneously with no individual query error — clients see disconnect errors (connection reset, FATAL:…
Advisory Lock Leakage — Dangling Locks
⚠️ Symptoms One or more application threads hang at the point where they call pg_advisory_lock — not on a database…
Unused Indexes Consuming Space
Disk usage on a table is far larger than the data warrants; write throughput is lower than expected on a…
Table Bloat Dead Tuples
pg_relation_size / \dt+ shows a table far larger than the live data justifies (e.g. 40 MB for 200,000 small rows). Sequential scans…
Maintenance & VacuumTables Not Being Autovacuumed
Growing table/index bloat; queries slowing as dead tuples accumulate; pg_stat_user_tables shows a high n_dead_tup with last_autovacuum NULL (or very old)…
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- ✓ The full verification step for every recipe — executed, not described.
- ✓ Catalog & log queries that surface every at-risk object up front.
- ✓ Cross-version gotchas across PostgreSQL 14–18.
- ✓ Exactly where each symptom surfaces on managed Postgres.