| >> 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 in Postgres https://blog.sentry.io/transaction-id-wraparound-in-postgres... Mailchimp / Mandrill — What We Learned from the Recent Mandrill Outage https://mailchimp.com/what-we-learned-from-the-recent-mandri... Joyent / Manta — Challenges deploying PostgreSQL (9.2) for high availability https://www.davepacheco.net/blog/2024/challenges-deploying-p... BattleMetrics — March 27, 2022 Postgres Transacton ID Wraparound https://learn.battlemetrics.com/article/64-march-27-2022-pos... Duffel — concurrency control & vacuuming in PostgreSQL https://duffel.com/blog/understanding-outage-concurrency-vac... Figma — Postmortem: Service disruption on January 21–22, 2020 https://www.figma.com/blog/post-mortem-service-disruption-on... Even AWS updated their recommendation as recently as Feb 2025, and is an issue in Aurora Postgres as well as Postgres. "Prevent transaction ID wraparound by using postgres_get_av_diag() for monitoring autovacuum"
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/prevent-transaction-id... |