Top all-time · #10322
Dave Pacheco
Personal blog · davepacheco.net/blog · on HN as dapsystemsprogramming
Dave Pacheco's personal blog at davepacheco.net covers systems and programming. Since 2021, 7 different Hacker News readers have linked it 10 times, most often “Challenges deploying PostgreSQL (9.2) for high availability”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-03-02, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (1) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog's account of a PostgreSQL production incident caused by transaction ID wraparound. The only comment discusses wraparound as a documented failure mode, with outage examples.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 1 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Challenges deploying PostgreSQL (9.2) for high availability3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-10-27
What Hacker News says?
>> What remains is me feeling triggered when it feels like users' pain is being casually dismissed. > Was that done in this thread? Well, I raised a general problem around 24/7/365 use cases (rooted in my operational experience, reinforced by the more-current words that I was replying to and the OP) and you called it "tedious", "low-info griping". Yes, that seems pretty dismissive. (Is it fair? Though I thought the…
Comment linking /blog/2024/challenges-deploying-postgresql-9.2-for-high-availability/
on “Vacuum Is a Lie: About Your Indexes”Submitted Developing for Debugging (2025) as a story · 47 points
HN discussion>> Just monitor it and you’re done. This is just anecdote, colliding with documented database behavior, who is not an issue on Oracle, SQL Server, or IBM DB2. PostgreSQL explicitly documents xid wraparound as a failure mode that can lead to catastrophic data loss and says vacuuming is required to prevent it. Near exhaustion, it will refuse commands. Small sample of known outages: - Sentry — Transaction ID Wraparound…
Comment linking /blog/2024/challenges-deploying-postgresql-9.2-for-high-availability/
on “PostgreSQL production incident caused by transaction ID wraparound”Submitted Heatmap coloring (2011) as a story · 21 points
HN discussionSubmitted TCP Puzzlers (2016) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Illumos tools for observing processes (2012) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Understanding SMF Properties as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Performance Puzzler: The Slow Server as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Challenges deploying PostgreSQL (9.2) for high availability as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted TCP Puzzlers (2016) as a story · 1 points
HN discussion