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A single idle-in-transaction connection can starve every table in your database. Most senior Rails devs don’t know that. You learned MVCC the way most of us did—”writers don’t block readers,” concurrent transactions get isolated snapshots, UPDATE doesn’t lock the table. That’s marketing copy. The operational reality is that those snapshots have a cost, and the cost compounds across every table at…
A single idle-in-transaction connection can starve every table in your database. Most senior Rails devs don’t know that. You learned MVCC the way most of us did—”writers don’t block readers,” concurrent transactions get isolated snapshots, UPDATE doesn’t lock the table. That’s marketing copy. The operational reality is that those snapshots have a cost, and the cost compounds across every table at once if one connection gets stuck. I’m going to try to translate what this mental model is that I’ve built while building and operating a Rails-based data pipeline that handles 10TB/day. Not “what is MVCC”—you’ve heard that—but instead consequences...Read on /posts/how-postgres-works-at-scale/ ↗
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