The Mysterious Timeout
Can you debug a database connection pool leak before the site goes down?
The Scenario
A popular e-commerce platform is experiencing intermittent failures during peak traffic. Connection pool exhaustion is causing cascading timeouts across the application. Your database metrics show connections climbing but never releasing. You need to find the root cause and fix it before the site goes completely offline.
What You'll Learn
How to identify connection pool exhaustion from database metrics
Reading pg_stat_activity to find leaked connections
Diagnosing ORM connection management issues
Setting proper pool sizes, timeouts, and idle connection limits
Tools You'll Use
Real-World Context
Connection pool exhaustion is one of the most common production database issues. Companies like Heroku, GitHub, and Shopify have all experienced variants of this incident.