5 min read
Why autovacuum ignores your biggest table
The default thresholds were sized for tables that don't exist anymore. Here's the math that actually scales — and the per-table overrides that fix it.
postgresqlautovacuumperformance tuning
The Postgres Guy
Blog
Postgres internals, performance, and operations — without the years of trial-and-error.
10 min read
How PgBouncer Handles Thousands of Connections on One Core
PgBouncer is a single process running a single-threaded event loop, and it routinely fronts more connections than Postgres could ever hold. Here's the architecture that makes that possible — and what a query actually goes through on its way to a backend.
postgresqlpgbouncerpgbouncer-deep-dive
5 min read
But It's a Simple Query — Why Is It So Slow?
Two WHERE clauses that look identical to you can look completely different to the PostgreSQL planner. A short tour of function volatility — IMMUTABLE, STABLE, VOLATILE — and why now() changes how your query gets planned.
postgresqlquery plannerperformance tuning
5 min read
UPDATE Doesn't Update: xmin, xmax, and the Ghost Rows in Your Tables
PostgreSQL never modifies a row in place. Every UPDATE writes a new version and leaves the old one behind. Here's the machinery — and why it explains half your performance problems.
postgresqlmvccinternals
18:275 min read
How PostgreSQL Really Handles Connections
Every connection to PostgreSQL spawns a dedicated OS process. That isolation is a feature — until you have 500 of them sitting idle, eating RAM, and your app starts getting FATAL errors. Here's what's actually happening under the hood.
postgresqlconnection poolingpgbouncer
6 min read
Why your index build took four hours — maintenance_work_mem explained
The third piece in a series on PostgreSQL memory. Why your CREATE INDEX crawled on a 500GB table, why autovacuum runs but doesn't finish the job, and the one setting you should be generous with.
postgresqlmaintenance_work_memperformance tuning
5 min read
Why your sort spilled to disk — and what to do about it
A misunderstood setting, a misread symptom, and the concurrency math nobody warns you about. The second piece in a series on PostgreSQL memory, this time on work_mem and why your sort spilled to disk.
postgresqlwork_memperformance tuning
6 min read
Continuous aggregates: the materialized view that refreshes itself
Your dashboard re-aggregates millions of rows on every page load. A plain materialized view goes stale and rebuilds the whole thing. TimescaleDB continuous aggregates fix both — incrementally — and most people set them up in a way that quietly recomputes the present every time. Here's how they actually work.
postgresqltimescaledbcontinuous aggregates
4 min read
Why adding more shared_buffers doesn't always help
The first piece in a series on PostgreSQL memory. Why the RAM that looks idle in htop is already working, why bigger shared_buffers stops helping past a point, and the one diagnostic that actually tells you whether you need more.
postgresqlshared_buffersperformance tuning
12 min read
Inside Hypercore: How TimescaleDB Quietly Built a Hybrid OLTP/OLAP Engine on Postgres
Hypercore isn't a new feature — it's a rename. The hybrid row-columnar storage engine inside TimescaleDB already existed as 'compression.' This post is the internals breakdown I wanted six months ago: chunks, compression algorithms, segmentby gotchas, and where it actually breaks.
postgresqltimescaledbhypercore
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