How PostgreSQL Handles a Backend Process Crash and Why It Drops All Connections

·4 views

When a PostgreSQL backend process crashes, the database engine does not isolate the failure to just that session. Because all backend processes share critical memory areas — including shared buffers, lock tables, and transaction status data — PostgreSQL cannot guarantee the integrity of those structures after a crash. As a safety measure, the postmaster immediately terminates all active connections and initiates automatic recovery before accepting new ones. A demonstration using Docker and pgbench showed that connected clients received warnings about the crash and were instructed to reconnect after recovery. This behavior is an intentional design feature of PostgreSQL, prioritizing data consistency over session continuity.

Read the full story at DEV Community

This is an AI-generated summary. ShortSingh links to the original source for the complete article.

Discussion (0)

Why Silent Service Failures Go Undetected and How Absence Detection Fixes It

Silent failures occur when a service stops functioning without generating any errors or alerts, leaving monitoring systems falsely showing healthy status. A common example is a background worker being killed by the operating system mid-process, causing task queues to back up while every alert threshold remains unbreached. Traditional error-based alerting cannot detect these failures because it requires data to evaluate, and a dead service produces none. Absence detection addresses this by learning each service's normal activity baseline — accounting for time of day and day of week — and alerting when log volume, trace throughput, or metric reporting drops unexpectedly. Tools like Epok apply this logic across all signal types simultaneously, flagging the specific stream or metric that went dark rather than issuing a vague warning.

0 comments Read more at DEV Community

ProgrammingDEV Community ·

Model Context Protocol: Why Tool Connections Determine AI Agent Success in Production

Model Context Protocol (MCP) is emerging as a critical layer that allows AI coding agents to connect with real-world services like databases, payment systems, and deployment platforms. Without MCP integrations, agents lack access to tools such as Postgres schemas, deploy logs, or authentication providers, limiting them to isolated, demo-like functionality. MCP works through a standardized handshake between an agent and external tools, with a growing ecosystem of supported services including Stripe, Sentry, Cloudflare, and Notion. Configuration is handled via simple JSON files at the repo level, enabling the same server setup to work across multiple agent environments like Cursor, Claude Code, and Windsurf. Experts argue that curating a small, focused set of five core tool integrations — covering database, payments, deployment, auth, and email — is more effective than exposing agents to a broad, uncurated catalog.

0 comments Read more at DEV Community

ProgrammingDEV Community ·

RSA JWT Validation in .NET Can Fail Due to Algorithm Identifier Mismatch

Developers validating RSA-signed JWTs in .NET may encounter signature validation failures even when the public key is correct. The root cause is often a mismatch in algorithm identifier format within the ValidAlgorithms configuration parameter. Some identity providers, particularly older WCF-based or enterprise SSO systems, express the signing algorithm as a full URI such as 'http://www.w3.org/2001/04/xmldsig-more#rsa-sha256' instead of the standard short form 'RS256'. If only the short-form identifier is listed in ValidAlgorithms, tokens using the URI form are rejected despite carrying a cryptographically valid signature. The fix is to include both identifier formats in the ValidAlgorithms list, ensuring tokens are accepted regardless of which format the issuing service uses.

0 comments Read more at DEV Community

ProgrammingDEV Community ·

Andrej Karpathy releases LLM Council, an open-source multi-AI debate framework

AI researcher Andrej Karpathy released an open-source project called LLM Council on July 5, 2026, which routes a user's question simultaneously to multiple large language models via OpenRouter and has each model anonymously review the others' responses. A designated Chairman LLM then synthesizes all answers and peer scores into a single final response, a process designed to reduce hallucinations through cross-model verification. Karpathy described the tool as a weekend 'Saturday hack' built largely with AI assistance, carrying no official support commitments or roadmap. The project has already attracted over 22,200 GitHub stars and 4,000 forks, resonating with developers frustrated by the difficulty of choosing among 200-plus available models. While research cited in the article suggests the ensemble approach can cut hallucinations by 40–60% compared to single-model queries, trade-offs include response latency of 30–60 seconds per query and proportionally higher token costs.

0 comments Read more at DEV Community