Omtheron
News and analysis from the world of production systems.
Practical Notes on Postgres Connection Pooling
July 30, 2026
Postgres connections are heavy - each backend carries megabytes of memory and a full process - so every scaled-out installation grows a pooler, and every pooler grows a dialect. Session pooling is nearly transparent; transaction pooling is fast and unforgiving, quietly breaking session features like LISTEN, advisory locks and SET.
Most pooler incidents trace to respect: sessions checked out and never returned, cursors held across sleeps, and schema changes that iterate every table while holding one checkout. Transaction mode makes those bugs louder instantly, which shortens the debugging at the cost of breaking the code that committed them.
The Hidden Cost of Chatty Microservices
May 6, 2026
Splitting a monolith into services trades local complexity for distributed complexity, and nowhere is that clearer than in fan-out. A request that used to make three function calls now makes three network calls, each with its own timeout, retry policy, and failure mode.…
Zero-Downtime Deployments Without the Drama
May 7, 2026
The folklore version of zero-downtime deployment involves blue-green environments and instant cutovers. The operational version is mostly about boring details: health checks that test real work, connection draining that actually finishes, and database migrations that respect the running version.…
HTTP/3 and QUIC: What Changed for Operators
May 23, 2026
QUIC moves the transport into userspace and encrypts most of the header, which is lovely for privacy and mildly annoying for anyone debugging with tcpdump. Flow control and congestion data that used to be visible on the wire now live behind the TLS key log.…
Email Deliverability: Authentication Beyond SPF
August 5, 2026
Relying strictly on SPF validation is long obsolete. Outbound mail can easily pass envelope checks while failing domain alignment, prompting modern receiving systems to evaluate cryptographic DKIM signatures and strict DMARC enforcement instead.…
More reading
- When to Choose a Queue Over a Request — Engineering, May 22, 2026
- The Operator's Guide to Load Testing — Engineering, July 18, 2026
- Data Residency Basics for Global Teams — Compliance, June 30, 2026
About us
We cover the unglamorous middle of software: queues that back up, caches that lie, and DNS at 3 a.m. Everything is written from real operational experience.