Pglocks.org

80•hnasr•1y ago

Comments

whilenot-dev•1y ago

I'm a bit lost here.

Locking is a challenging problem in complex systems. Is this list to be interpreted as a "TODO: get rid of locking conflicts in future releases" or more a "NOTE: be aware there are known conflicts that will not change - find ways to work around them"?

EDIT: Also, is the creation of this list an automated or a manual effort?

tux3•1y ago

I think this is intended as educational material, not a list of things to fix.

The locks are here by necessity, it is not so easy at all to get rid of them. And even in special cases where it is possible, the complexity you have to introduce is not to be taken lightly...

If even a tenth of these disapppeared, it would be incredible, in a very surprising way.

atombender•1y ago

The creator looks like a developer and teacher, not a Postgres core team member. So I assume this is for documentation purposes.

I actually like this a lot, as there isn't a single place in the Postgres documentation that lists all the possible locks; it's spread out all over. Having a quick reference for what kinds of commands you'd be blocking with your transaction is valuable.

It's pretty evident that the pages have been programmatically generated, but I'd love know what it's generated from. I think you can derive this information from the documentation, but not sure if you can do it in an automated way without an LLM.

braiamp•1y ago

> there isn't a single place in the Postgres documentation that lists all the possible locks

Did you read this page? https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/explicit-locking.htm...

atombender•1y ago

That's a great page, but it has several issues.

First, it isn't complete; as I said, the locking behaviour is spread out all over the Postgres documentation. For example, that page doesn't list what locks DROP INDEX takes. To find that out, you have to go to the documentation page for that command and read it carefully. In fact, really carefully — the locking behaviour is only documented under the section about CONCURRENTLY.

The page also doesn't list what possible commands are then blocked. Locks interact in subtle (and incorrectly named!) ways that are explained in the tables on that page ("Conflicting lock modes"), so to understand if something will block something else you have to look at the two commands you are curious about and then look at how their locks interact.

gulcin_xata•1y ago

I agree, it is not so straightforward to find out.

braiamp•1y ago

These are database locks, which means that depending which arrives first, the later transaction has to wait till the first one finishes to complete. These locks are about SQL commands and which commands can run concurrently with the others. There's a graph here of how that looks like https://pankrat.github.io/2015/django-migrations-without-dow...

Usually for maximum performance (minimum latency, maximum throughput) you want to have operations not lock each other, unless absolutely necessary, in which case you want them to be short.

whilenot-dev•1y ago

You make it sound like the conflict is just affecting performance and won't result in a deadlock. So it's for performance aware postgres clients/users, and not for postgres developers?

andyferris•1y ago

It is a guide for developers using postgres as a client, who need to write systems that don't deadlock, are performant and are correct. These are the (rather sharp) tools that postgres provides for doing so (or else you can use e.g. serializable isolation and optimistic concurrency, but in my experience that has too many false positives and bail out rather eagerly, whereas these tools let you be very precise and granular).

mebcitto•1y ago

Other relevant talks/blogs that I found really useful for understanding Postgres locks are:

* Unlocking the Postgres Lock Manager by Bruce Momjian: https://momjian.us/main/writings/pgsql/locking.pdf

* Anatomy of table-level locks by Gulcin Yildirim Jelinek: https://xata.io/blog/anatomy-of-locks

pasxizeis•1y ago

Shameless plug: I wrote a tool[1] that executes a given migration against a test database (e.g. in your CI) and reports back what locks it acquired.

The rationale being to have a "lock diagnostics report" commented in your PR's migration file.

It's a prototype and has a few rough edges and missing functionality, but feedback is more than welcome.

[1] https://github.com/agis/pglockanalyze

jononor•1y ago

Very practical! Locking is one of the things that can really bite when doing migrations.

Fable turned reMarkable into Tom Riddle's diary from Harry Potter

OpenWrt One – Open Hardware Router

How to sequence your own DNA at home

CoMaps – FOSS Offline Maps

GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

Ternlight – 7 MB embedding model that runs in browser (WASM)

NSA and IETF: Fairness

A global workspace in language models

Pruning RAG context down to what the answer actually needs

Small AI Models Gain Traction In places with unreliable networks

A 2048-spin bulk acoustic wave Ising machine for number partitioning and Sudoku

Strata – An app that talks me out of dying outdoors

Linux on the Atari Jaguar

Resetting Xbox

Stealth robotics startup (YC S26) is hiring principal engineers (Palo Alto)

AMD Ryzen AI Halo – $4k AI Dev Kit

Full Writeup of the Windows GDID

Craig Mod built his own Good Reads

OpenSSH 10.4/10.4p1 Released

Acronym Fatigue Series Introduction: why I'm wary of acronyms

OfficeCLI: Office suite for AI agents to read and edit Microsoft Office files

Learning to code is still worthwhile

Evaluation order and nontermination in query languages

Aluminum foil (2021)

The LLVM Compiler Infrastructure

Poly/ML – A Standard ML Implementation

The Music of Destruction

Januscape: Guest-to-Host Escape in KVM/x86 [CVE-2026-53359]

M/PC – A Concatenative OS

AI: The ROI Runway Could Be Long Outside the Tech Sector