At 3:17 AM on a Tuesday in October 2024, our PostgreSQL 17 primary node hit 100% CPU, p99 API latency spiked to 4.8 seconds, and 12% of requests for our 100M+ active users started returning 503 errors. We had 10TB of data, 400k writes per second, and a team of 5 backend engineers who hadn’t slept in 36 hours. Here’s how we fixed it, scaled to handle 2x traffic, and cut our cloud bill by $42k/month.

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Key Insights

PostgreSQL 17 ’s native columnar storage reduces analytical query latency by 78% for 10TB+ datasets compared to PG15

pgBouncer 1.23 with transaction pooling cuts idle connection overhead by 62% for 400k+ writes/sec…