Key Lessons for Running PostgreSQL Reliably at Scale

A software engineer at NovaAIOps has shared operational lessons from managing a PostgreSQL database serving millions of users. Among the critical takeaways is the importance of tuning autovacuum early, as neglecting it causes dead tuple accumulation and severe query slowdowns over time. Connection pooling via tools like PgBouncer is essential, since Postgres connections are resource-heavy and can be exhausted if unmanaged. Long-running transactions were flagged as a silent threat, capable of blocking vacuum processes and causing table bloat that degrades performance. The author also stressed regularly practicing database restores on real data volumes, noting that an 800GB production backup took 11 hours to restore — a critical metric to know before an outage occurs.